Mr. Stitch

The adjunct shrugged. “I don’t suppose. I mean, if we can’t trust the Coroners to know what heresy is, who can we trust?”

This was a valid point, and one that Valentine could not dispute. In fact, it led him to some serious questions as to why, as a coroner, he hadn’t been required to read all of this material in the first place. It was surely no wonder that thousands of heretics were constantly operating directly under the noses of Beckett and his fellow inspectors when they had only the barest idea of what to look for. Something, Valentine thought, to bring up with Stitch. Maybe he could read them all, and at least print up a bunch of notes for us to look at? Valentine could not recall having read more than the most skeletal descriptions of the thirteen heretical sciences, and what kinds of things precisely counted.

It was all in one pamphlet, with a number of columns. “Healing the sick,” for example, was in the “acceptable” column. “Raising the dead” was in the “heretical” column.

The ectoplasmatics section of the Library was arranged ostensibly alphabetically, but more than three quarters of the books, papers, quartos, folios, and scrolls were anonymously attributed, and so the bulk of the material was arranged by date of confiscation. This was more than a little confusing, because a late date of confiscation didn’t necessarily indicate a late date of creation. There were a number of dirty, weathered rolls of vellum that had to date back to Agon Diethes’ time, but which hadn’t been discovered until 1808-and so they were shelved more recently than a pamphlet that had been seized in 1788 and couldn’t have been more than a year old when it was picked up.

Valentine looked at the daunting array of material and sighed. Hundreds of confiscated books, along with probably ten times that many executions, and the stupid bastards kept writing them. How many centuries of history does it take for men to finally give up on something?

“Well,” he said aloud, as he ran his finger lightly along the volumes. “Of course they’re crazy. That’s why they’re heretics.” He found a fat black volume, brought to the Black Library during the 17^thcentury, and drew it out. It was in an old-fashioned Sarpejk dialect that Valentine found he could read tolerably well, and he sat down to muddle through it.

It was only an hour or two before he gave up, and turned back to the shelves, looking for something else. He found a pamphlet from only half a century ago and breezed through it, looking for key words or phrases, jotting down notes when he was of a mind. He continued this process-picking a book at random and skimming it, trying to just get some idea of what ectoplasmatic texts were supposed to look like, for the better part of the day.

Valentine had been chewing one particularly tough text in Old Middle Thranc-lost in a tangle of increasingly- obscure descriptors that he couldn’t determine were bad metaphor, a secret code, anagogic theology, or just a peculiarity of 15^thcentury Thranc grammar-when the adjunct rushed back into the room, face ruddy and panicked.

“Mr. Vie-Gorgon. Inspector. Sir,” he said, gasping for breath. “They sent…your driver sent…sent me.” He gasped again. “They need you. In Red Lanes. There’s been…an incident.”

Nine

“So, I’ve been reading this stuff,” Valentine was saying, but Beckett wasn’t really listening. “Some of it, you know, not too much, because then, well, it’s just complicated isn’t it?”

They were in the dining room of the Hotel Jaise, which offered a bill of fare that would have been fantastically intimidating to anyone except for Valentine, who immediately began to proceed through all five courses of dinner. Beckett picked at some kind of complicated fish plate-some intricate arrangement of smoked fishes and pickled fruits, slathered with a tangy, reddish-brown sauce whose origins the old coroner couldn’t place. Rich, the way they made all the sauces in Sar-Sarpek these days, but spicier. Probably another Corsay transplant.

Beckett forced his attention back to Valentine, whose explanation was only interrupted for the length of time it took him to shovel some delicious new morsel into his mouth, at a speed that must have made actually tasting the food impossible, and was no doubt a great insult to the chef. “…mmmfgh. Anyway, look, the old books, the ones in the Abbey library? They’re a mess. Every last one of them. I mean, I didn’t read every one of them. But all the ones I looked at, and I think it’s a safe bet that no one really knows what they’re talking about. They can’t…” he swallowed a spoonful of fruit concoction. “…mggh. Can’t make up their mind, I mean, whether they’re trying to talk in a secret code and just allude to what they mean, or if they’re giving instructions, or what. I mean, we know that ectoplasmatics is a science, right, but none of the ectoplasmatists seem to know it. Like the science is just an accidental…” he had some more fruit. “This is really good, by the way. Tart, a little sweet, but smooth. Sorry. Right, the science is just an accident of the religious stuff. They’re doing science, but they think they’re praying, you know what I mean?”

Gorud was watching Valentine intently, but Beckett had no idea whether or not the therian understood him. How smart were they? The coroner knew that he tended to think of them like children. Or else, to think of them as they appeared: unusually intelligent monkeys. But being smarter than a monkey wasn’t the same thing as being as smart as a person. Therians could speak all different languages, Beckett recalled, but they couldn’t read. Is it possible to be intelligent but illiterate?

The therian was looking at him, suddenly, while Valentine droned on. Gorud had bright orange eyes, a fiery gold color in the lamplight, with a black sclera. He blinked rarely, just stared at him with those close-set eyes and heavy brows, from atop his elongated muzzle. He sometimes puffed out his cheeks. The ruff of fur around his face quivered as though stirred by a gentle breeze and, unaccountably uncomfortable, Beckett turned away from him.

Someone had let birds into the dining room-a pair of small white snowbirds that flittered around the ceiling beams, chasing each other around. They were fighting, or mating, Beckett wasn’t sure how to tell. The birds were very white.

“Beckett?”

Valentine was speaking to him. “What?” Beckett muttered. “What is it?”

“I was asking if…are you all right?”

“Of course I’m all right.” He looked down at his fish. “I’m just not especially hungry. Had a big lunch.”

“Yes. Okay, right. Well, have you seen something like this before? The pamphlets are typewritten, right, so they must be new. The pamphlets must be new, I mean, but maybe there were earlier forms…?”

“Well,” Beckett snapped at him. “Did you see any in the library?”

“Ah. No.”

Beckett shrugged, and picked at his fish again. It kept shifting away from the fork in tiny increments, as though it were ever-so-slightly trying to avoid it. He couldn’t blame it. If he were chopped up on a plate, he probably wouldn’t want to be eaten either.

“…and there’s a city made out of brass, on the other side of a stormy ocean, and there are things that live in that city-”

“What?” Beckett’s attention snapped back to Valentine. “There’s what?”

“Uhm.” Valentine looked over to Gorud, who did not respond. “I said there were diagrams. In the pamphlet.” He was gesturing to a stack of rumpled papers-notes that Beckett had not seen him pull out. “I made a sketch, see? It’s something to do with the lungs and the four humors, but, you know, like I said, I didn’t want to read it too closely…”

Beckett nodded again, and was then possessed of a sudden urge to look beneath the table. He gently drew the table cloth up, to look down at his feet, and saw that he was standing in water. He looked up and around, and saw that the entire width of the floor was covered in six inches of black, swirling brine. The other diners swirled their feet in it. The waiters splashed through it as they brought people their meals.

“I…” Beckett began, but hesitated. Isn’t there supposed to be water on the floor? That’s where they get the fish from. He could, indeed, see small, slim-bodied animals wriggling through the water, yellow lights glittering off of their backs. Not fish. Were they eels? The animals began wriggling towards his ankles now, and one turned upwards, opening a tiny mouth that was just a round aperture filled with tiny little barbs, whirling in a little circle.