Mr. Stitch

carried lanterns.

“We could smell…it smelled like vinegar. Someone said later that the ettercap make it. With their bodies, somehow, they spray it…but you could smell it. It was strong, and it got stronger the deeper we went. The caves got smaller, so only four men could walk side by side. The lanterns didn’t send light far enough ahead. Just a little bit of light at your feet. You could see the man next to you.

“When they came…there was this…sound. This chewing sound. It…we thought it was at the end of the tunnel, but it wasn’t, it was all around us. They came at us. There were openings in the top of the tunnel. We hadn’t seen them, in the dark. It was a trap. They came at us with this great…they were like claws or teeth or I don’t know…you could see their mouths. They had mouths like human beings. Lips. Little white teeth. Pretty mouths, like a girl’s. And when they come you go a little crazy, and you think, ‘I could kiss a mouth like that.’ They come at you and it’s…you can’t see anything…there’s just men shouting and you shoot your gun off and try and hit whatever you can and…

“You can’t back up, because there’s men packed in behind you. You can’t go forward, because there’s men ahead of you. You just shoot and shoot, and the men around you get snatched up or bit in half or something long and black stabs them in the heart, and if you’re lucky they’ll go away before too long. Then you start to pull back out of the tunnel and regroup. Then they send you in again. And again.”

The man was silent for a moment, then he whispered softly. “It’s dark in here. I don’t like it. Do you have any light?”

There was a faint scratch of the key in a phlogiston lantern, and Emilia said, “Here. More light.” She laid her fingers faintly on Skinner’s arm. “Joshua lost both of his hands after his second battle. His arms had to be amputated at the elbow, because of an infection that accompanies ettercap injuries. There are mechanologists working on replacement parts for him, but there are many injuries, and not much money to build brass hands for them.”

In the coach, Skinner snapped at her patron. “That was horrific. Why did you do that to me? To him?”

“Because it was horrific,” Emilia replied, smoothly. “I am given to understand that writers are rarely inspired by the purely quotidian.”

“I worked for the Coroners for years, Miss Vie-Gorgon. I don’t need an object example from you about how disgusting humanity can be. I don’t…how dare…how dare you. Do you honestly think I’m struggling with this because I don’t understand the horrors that men have had to face? Do you know how many partners I went through before I was paired up with Beckett? Three. The first was taken apart by a Reanimate in the cellar of a mansion in Swindon. Not just killed, not at first-just torn limb from limb, the way a child plucks the wings off a fly. And I had no choice but to sit and listen to it, to keep track of the Reanimate’s position so that we could send someone else in after it. You don’t need to…” Skinner took a deep breath, tried to tamp her anger down. “What exactly did you think I was going to do? That I’d take the misery of these men and find a place for it in the play?”

Silence as only Emilia Vie-Gorgon could be silent. Was she evaluating what she was about to say? Trying to evaluate Skinner’s state of mind, and how she’d respond? Reconsidering the whole project? Was she amused, angry, offended, or just tired?

“Well,” said Emilia, eventually. “Will you?”

“There was no way out, trapped in that box canyon. We could neither advance nor retreat, nor move save to swing our swords to save our lives. We were surrounded and outnumbered, and we would have died there to the last of us, had not Theocles, bedecked in gore like his own armor…this is good.” The actor scratched his nose and looked at his pages again. “I like this. So, I’m going to be, what, like bloody and bandaged up here?”

“Yes,” the director responded. “We’re going to have you start off the whole thing, just come in all gruesome like that. It should give a nice ambience to the rest of the piece.”

“Isn’t it weird that I’m praising Theocles, though? Like making him out to be a hero?”

“Yes, that’s the dichotomy, Charles. We want to set Theocles up as a war-hero in the beginning, so that his descent into cruelty is heightened.”

Skinner sat in the back of the theater, listening. She was in the dark, and none of the actors would have recognized her as the writer, anyway. They’d been receiving the pages of the script anonymously. While she still felt a twinge of guilt, using the story she’d heard like this, she had to admit it had helped. The visit to the hospice had given her a broad brush with which to paint the horrors of war across the script, lending both a dark, gritty reality to the story, and helping to generate a depth of sympathy for Theocles’ character.

Is it all right if I’m doing it for the right reasons? She wondered. If it leads to a more conscientious rule, to less of a willingness to wage war…does that make it worth it?

Twelve

True Spring came, with the comfortable regularity of all of Trowth’s seasons, and if there was one time during that city’s long war against its elements that could even remotely be described as comfortable, it was True Spring. Second Winter thawed, snow melted, and the streets ran thick with cold, clear water. Crisp, salty breezes snuck past Trowth’s ancient sea-wall, and came close to dispelling its omnipresent umbra of cloud and pollution. The sun warmed the city’s old stones.

The end of the season would turn raw and rainy, of course, as heavy, damp air poured in from the sea, but, every year, for two weeks at the beginning of the season, Trowth enjoyed as close to perfect weather as the benighted metropolis was capable of. The Armistice, as these two weeks were commonly called in deference to the unacknowledged campaign that the weather waged against the town, extended to every aspect of Trowthi life. Old enmities were forgotten, debts were-if not forgiven-at least suspended, no harsh words were offered. Two weeks of clear, warm weather after the annual nightmare of Second Winter was enough to cool even the hottest-tempered ruffians; well-to-do citizens and irascible low-lifes alike poured into the street, and no man or woman even considered marring these days with violence or misdemeanor.

Shutters were thrown back, doors and windows left open, and warm feelings and good cheer filled the vast honeycomb of houses, pouring out into the streets, where men and women promenaded late in the lengthening days. All of the human and indige need for human contact, pent up and repressed for the rest of the icy year, found expression during Armistice, and seemed determined to make up for lost time.

It was no surprise that the Armistice was also a time for theater premiers; both the Royal and the Public saved all of their most promising work for the warm True Spring grace period, during which time audiences were traditionally larger and more well-disposed to spread positive word of good performances. Very occasionally, the theaters used this temporary period of universal largess to support plays that, otherwise, might have raised violent objections. Theocles-published, for propriety’s sake, under the innocuous nom-de-plume “E. E. Beckett”-would have earned approbation simply for its first ten minutes, so clever and vicious was Elizabeth Skinner’s excoriation of the Emperor and his war. It was hardly a surprise that Emilia Vie-Gorgon had arranged for the premiere of Theocles to fall on the second day of Armistice which arrived, as all seasons in Trowth arrive, precisely and dramatically.

Valentine Vie-Gorgon was entirely unaware of his cousin’s machinations, or indeed, her or of Skinner’s involvement with the play at all. What he did know is that his long-exasperated but always-affectionate father had given him a ticket for the reviewer’s box, and there was little the young coroner enjoyed more than the social and artistic entertainment provided by a night at the theater. Valentine shared the box with Roger Gorgon-Crabtree, a noted reviewer for the White Star. Roger was a very fat and conspicuously charming man, whose affable, almost vapid demeanor belied a razor wit and an almost encyclopedic knowledge of his subject. He was, in short, absolutely the ideal companion for the premiere of Theocles.

Roger met Valentine at the theater’s entrance, where they were permitted to go directly to their seats- tickets having already been collected. A substantial crowd milled pleasantly outside, eager for admittance and