Mr. Stitch

every stone, every broken pile of furniture, every corpse. In time, it would wrestle the truth from uncooperative evidence.

“Thoughts?” Stitch asked.

Beckett shrugged. “Oneiric munition, I think. Could be the ettercap, treaty or no. They’ve attacked in the city before. But there was a lot brought back by our own soldiers, a lot misplaced. Anyone could have gotten a hold of something like that.”

“So. Why?”

“It could be the gangs,” Valentine put in. “Anonymous John works in Red Lanes a lot. They’ve been getting bolder, lately.”

The old coroner allowed that this could certainly be possible. “It could be…” Beckett muttered. “It could be sharpsies. I know most of them ran, but…you could hide an army in the Arcadium. It’d just take one with a grudge.” He rubbed his face, over his blind eye, ignored the eerie sensation caused by the numbness. “Hell, it could be anyone. Just carrying a weapon like that around could drive you insane. He might have dropped it on the gendarmes because they’d chased him off from some doorstep, or because he was hallucinating and thought that it was the imperial palace. He might have thought it was his mother’s house.”

Stitch nodded. “I. Will. Investigate.”

“Hm,” Beckett replied. “Fine. Fine.”

The giant reanimate shambled off, its subtle aura of menace seemed to drag James away, causing the knocker to follow after it like a small moon pulled into orbit. Beckett watched them for a few moments, then turned to Valentine. “All right. Did you read that pamphlet?”

“Oh! Yes. Here, hang on, I made notes…”

“Not now,” Beckett said. “Not here. Come with me. Have you met Gorud?”

Seven

While she rode back to her boarding house, Skinner chewed and spat and flexed her fingers, itching for the chance to snare Gorgon-Ennering-Crabtree’s neck and just crush it. The thought was deeply satisfying, though she knew the act would be far more trouble than it was worth. Still, it didn’t hurt to think about it, and so she allowed herself several minutes of purely murderous daydreaming. The fantasy passed, and left her with a slick sickness of shame at her joy. Skinner set it aside.

At the house, she left the coachman behind, who muttered about the fare and seemed nearly courageous enough to demand it from her, involvement with the Coroners be damned, and likewise damned the dishonor implicit in demanding money from a blind girl. If he might have complained, he was stilled by the presence of Mrs. Crewell. Skinner could hear her at the door, great lungs full and ready to lay into the man, whether his request was reasonable or not.

If anything came of it, Skinner never found out. She retreated to her room and sat by her window, pressing her hearing out where she knew it was quiet. Mrs. Crewell’s boarding house had its back to the Daior Chapel necropolis. Skinner listened to the dead, and let them soothe her.

Silence, to a knocker, is a strange phenomenon, and especially strange in a city like Trowth. The city’s sighted inhabitants often ignore it, preoccupied with the desolate loneliness of gray stone and worn, green bronze. Their eyes distract them from the merciless quiet of the city, whose cavernous stone underbelly, thick fogs, and bitter cold seem to muffle the casual sounds of daily living. During Second Winter, there are not even beggars in the street, or ragmen or bone-pickers harvesting their merchandise. There are no rats, or crows, or seagulls to hunt the empty city streets for scraps-all life that has no home to go to retreats deep into the Arcadium, ceding ground to the inevitable icy onslaught.

Despite the ringing, resonant quiet of the city, the eerie underpinning of stillness that quietly draws the life from the most animated conversations, there are very few places that were truly silent to Skinner’s preternatural hearing. Always, above that black gap of quiet was a haze of tiny noises-of hurried breaths and distant echoes, ruffling wool and rattling footsteps. The myriad sounds of humanity drew her clairaudience to them, exerting a nearly-imperceptible pull on her senses.

It was often thought that knockers were capable of communicating with the dead, and this was because of how they often chose to live near graveyards. The misconception stemmed from the average citizen’s inability to understand what it meant for the knockers, that their hearing should be so painfully acute. Knockers listened to the dead not because corpses were noted conversationalists, or because they had eldritch secrets to impart; they listened because the dead were so benignly quiet.

The Vie-Gorgon coach came for Skinner sharp at seven, rolling to a stop just as Chapel bells finished tolling the hour. The echo faded, and dissolved into the sounds of Mrs. Crewell, busying herself about the house with a housekeeper’s native self-importance. She would not suffer a spot of dust on the day that the Raithower Vie-Gorgon coach came to her hotel, even if it carried a man of such small importance as the Raithower Vie-Gorgon coachman. Coachmen talk, Mrs. Crewell well knew, and she’d not have any gossip about the state of her house.

The coach was warm, and of a style that Skinner was unfamiliar with-she shared a large compartment with the driver himself, separated from him by a mesh partition, rather than having him sit outside, warmed only by portable heating mechanisms. Skinner could hear him breathing and shuffling about behind the screen, whickering softly to his horses as the need arose. He did not speak to her, though, and Skinner felt strange raising her voice to him. Was it appropriate to speak to a coachman if he was sitting inside with you? It would be rude to say nothing, wouldn’t it? But he was also a Vie-Gorgon coachman, and the Vie-Gorgons took propriety very seriously. Surely he’d be offended if she said something. Or not? Perhaps he hated the stifling conformity demanded by polite society, and was really itching for an ordinary conversation with an ordinary person, and was just waiting for her to say something?

Am I nervous? Skinner thought to herself. Is this why I’m losing my mind? “Do you,” she said, then cleared her throat. “I mean, have you been to the Royal, before?”

There was a moment of considered silence, and Skinner worried again that she’d made the wrong decision. When he spoke, the coachman had a grizzled old working-man’s voice that seemed out of place. “Once. Miss V gave me and the missus floor tickets.”

“What did you see?”

“Oh. Hm. Conscious…Conscientious Assignations, I think it were called. Big fuss about it in the papers, you know? That Eveham fellow was all over it, and he’s a laugh for a read, but I can’t say I’ve ever much cared for anything he’s got behind. Couldn’t find nothing particularly interesting about this one. Closed quick too, didn’t it?”

“Closed quick” might have been an understatement, Skinner thought. The Conscious Assignation had played at the Royal for a week, billowed by favorable reviews from Andre Eveham, the drama critic at the White Star. If he was actually a poor arbiter of theatrical quality- and, as some suspected, really just a mouthpiece for the Empire’s preferences for the theater-he made up for it with a brutally clever wit. Eveham’s reviews were the most widely read in the city, but seemed to have little bearing on the success of their subjects.

“You didn’t like it?” She asked.

“Well, it didn’t make sense, did it? Fella’s keeping that woman safe, right, because her uncle’s after her? And so he’s got her in that little house, right…did you see it?” He coughed. “Er. Uhm, sorry miss. I mean…did you…had you…uh…”

“I was there opening night, sir,” she told him, a small smile on her face. “I like opening nights.”

“Yeah, well, all right,” the coachman went on. “So he’s got her in that house, right? But there’s never no, you know. Touchin’, or nothing like that. And they’re goin’ to be married at the end of the play, we think they’re in love and all that, right? But he’s been to that little room every night, and not once have they put hands on each other.”

“Well. I think that’d be more than a trifle scandalous, wouldn’t you? Hardly a conscientious assignation, then.”

“Yur, well, I know. Can’t do none of that stuff on the stage, can you? Some committee or other would be on