Mr. Stitch

Chris Braak Mr. Stitch

One

I cannot but think that the highest act of the created is to become the creator himself. Is not grasping Reason a gift bequeathed to us by solemn Divinity? There are atheists among the scientific minds, this is true. These men consider that all moral law is as nothing before the application of Science. They consider that there should be no field beyond the bounds of man’s intellect, and so engage in an even-handed fashion all of those pursuits deemed heretical by the Church.

I believe this to be an erroneous conclusion in the first part, and that in the second part it leads to discoveries that are haphazard and ultimately foolishness. The truth is this: it is not simply the case that there is no scientific heresy, but rather that those elements of study which seem by most to be heretical are the ones demanded most by the Divine.

Science must not be merely faithless, but truly blasphemous, for only in this way can we show that the act of Reason is the truest expression faith.

— from the journal of Harcourt Wolfram, 1785

The undercroft of Vie Abbey is considered by most to be no fit place for any sensible person to spend their time. It is a monstrously large labyrinth of catacombs, built on top of a monstrously large system of caves-tunnels hollowed out by the prehistoric antecedents of the River Stark, which spent the early years of prehistory honeycombing the bedrock that is the foundation of the city of Trowth. Certain maps of the catacombs are available, though unreliable; the assorted Abbots of the Church Royal-many of whom had peculiar and salacious appetite-had historically found good reasons to keep certain quarters of the undercroft secret, and likewise to reveal certain portions in order to discredit their predecessors.

No trustworthy maps of the caves are available, nor is there any information about how many they are, where they lead to, or how deep they go. This made the entire complex a haven for superstitious heretics, who preferred the religiously-charged environment of the undercroft to the more secular mysteries of the Arcadium. Something about practicing heresy right at the heart of the Church Royal was appealing to certain oneiricists and chimeratics.

And the ectoplasmatists. Elijah Beckett, detective-inspector of the Royal Coroners, found that, in his old age, he detested the ectoplasmatists more than any of the other heretical scientists. At least, he found himself thinking, as he waded through some kind of ankle-high sludge, deep in the undercroft, at least necrologists have laboratories where they need to keep things dry. What is this, anyway? It was an idle thought, and one that he quickly crushed. Survival in the Coroners meant developing a resistance to the disgusting, and after many long years, Beckett found that the most formidable resistance was, “don’t think about it.”

Beckett shuffled along, carrying a small heat-lamp; it sizzled and sparked and cast flickering shadows with its red light. He didn’t like the noise it made, but there was nothing for it-Second Winter had brought its omnipotent chill all the way through the city and into the undercroft; without a heat source, he’d be dead and frozen in a heartbeat. Frost rimed the stone walls, even where the weight of the earth should have kept the temperature constant.

His knocker clattered something unintelligible on a nearby wall, and made him pause. He couldn’t understand the code-in fact, he hadn’t been able to interpret the telerhythmia of any of the knockers they’d saddled him with since he lost Skinner-but he was made anxious by the fact that James was trying to communicate with him. Was he warning him? Beckett tried to pry meaning out of the rapid double-rap on the sooty stone wall by his side, but it was useless. Something was down here with him, he knew that much, but whether it was ahead or behind, near or far, the knocker couldn’t tell him.

Useless, Beckett grumbled. He slipped his revolver back into its holster, and pulled out a flask of veneine-laced brandy. He was finding that he needed more and more veneine to keep the pain at bay but, paradoxically, the hallucinations it caused were coming more easily. He sipped at it, the sharp edge of the veneine satisfying the feeling in the back of his mouth that was both a sense that he was bleeding deep in his throat, and a craving for the drug. He swallowed, and steeled himself against the wave of strangeness that washed over him; the world flickered and distorted, as though he were seeing it briefly through a curved mirror. There was a sense of shallowness then, that the faintly illuminated stones in the undercroft were just painted on top of something deeper, vaster, that the whole world was a tiny, visible island set atop an enormous, incomprehensible abysm…

The feeling passed, and something flickered in the periphery of his right eye. Since the fades had taken his left, he’d found that his good eye had become unusually sensitive to sudden movement.

“Shit,” Beckett said, dropping the brandy and clutching at his revolver. The lamp, don’t drop the lamp, he whirled and drew his weapon. Something had come up behind him, a hunched shape; it carried its own lamp like a glowing red eye, but was black with shadow behind the light-its edges shimmered and shifted, as though they couldn’t be bothered to hold to the shape that nature had given them, and Beckett thought suddenly of a face, twisted into a hideous rictus, lolling on a broken neck…

Beckett fired at once, and the sound of the Feathersmith revolver and its echoes stuttered along stone walls like a rolling thunderclap. The first shot missed, drawing sparks and stone chips from a low arch. The shape was moving, ducking down, its red eye glaring. Beckett drew a bead on it as the sound of the gunshot died down, and the thing’s voice resolved in the darkness.

“Beckett! Beckett, stop, it’s me!”

“Valentine?” Beckett put up his gone. “What the hell are you doing down here?” He could see the young man now, as he stepped into the light from Beckett’s own lamp. Valentine Vie-Gorgon was tall, with a lean frame entirely disguised by the huge, heavy winter coat that he wore. Heat washed over them both, as they stood within the range of each other’s lamps.

“James didn’t tell you I was coming down?”

“He did. I just…” Beckett looked around for his flask of brandy, now probably lost forever in the sludge at his feet. “I must have mis-heard his signal. I thought…I thought he was talking about another-”

“DOWN!” Valentine shouted, suddenly shoving Beckett out of the way. He had a silver-plated revolver in his hands and was firing into the dark, the explosions from the revolver deafening them both, the muzzle-flash blinding.

Beckett held up his hands to shield his eyes as he crashed into the stone wall; it would hurt later, he knew, but for now the veneine helped him feel nothing. Lit up by the brief flashes from Valentine’s gun, he saw a man duck away down a side passage.

“Stop,” Beckett said. “Stop!” He grabbed Valentine’s arm. “Enough, he’s gone down the side.” The knocker’s code was rattling furiously against the walls, but it was all gibberish to Beckett’s ears. “Come on!”

Beckett ran, but was outpaced by his partner, whose longer legs and limitless enthusiasm propelled him in a reckless sprint down the tunnel and around the corner, only to suddenly duck and spin away from the aperture as gunshots rebounded off the walls. Valentine dove to the side and pressed his back against the wall just as Beckett, crouched low with the gun held at his hip, fired into the darkness, even before the figure resolved itself.

Not the figure, he saw, but figures. There were two men in the dark, Beckett saw in the split second before he shot, one that tried to take off farther down the tunnel, and a second that was running towards him. Without thinking, Beckett fired on the nearer shape, only to feel a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach as his bullets splashed harmlessly through it. Wrong one, he realized too late, even as Valentine reappeared, gun blazing, taking potshots at the retreating shape.