One of the men fired his revolver off into the air; the other two responded. Yet a fourth sounded right nearby, nearly startling Valentine from his perch. The one who’d fired looked just the same as the others-the same ragged blue shirt, the same green glimmer across his face.
“Here!” The stranger shouted, “It’s going to start here. I’m going to stop it! Don’t you understand? I have to stop…to stop it!” His empty sockets turned towards Valentine, and the coroner could just make out the opaque, jade green sclera of his eyes. He leveled his revolver, and Valentine snapped the cane at his head, aiming right for that weird light on his face…
He felt the walking stick connect, and felt his arm draw back simultaneously, felt himself hesitate a second too long and take a bullet in his chest, felt himself crack the man’s skull before the gun could go off, felt a dozen possible past and future moments fracture in a spiderweb of disrupted causality…
And then the man was gone, and in his place was nothing but the absolute certainty that there had never been anyone there in the first place.
“Aw, nuts.”
The crowd was gone now, pressed to the far exits and finally squeezed outside. Valentine saw five men now with their guns, and two people-a man and a woman-lying across the chairs, bleeding from wounds in their chests. The green-glimmer men were casting about wildly, shouting incoherently about stopping…something.
Of course they were mad. Or, really,
“This moment is the end,” the men shouted-that, or some variation on it, each glimmering figures words colored by slight causal variations. “This is the last time. This is the edge of now. All past and future moments are echoes of this one!”
“Valentine!”
The coroner looked around; he’d know Skinner’s voice anywhere. After a second, he saw her in Emilia’s box seat. She stood with her head cocked to the side. Pointing.
Pointing at the doppelganger on the stage, the one that was stamping his feet and frothing.
Like all young men of his economic class, Valentine Vie-Gorgon had an extensive and expensive education. It covered many topics, including the arts, science, literature, politics, and military strategy. It also included training in a number of “gentlemen sports”-a euphemism for the violent soldiering techniques that, as a member of Trowth’s elite high society, Valentine would never be called on to use. They included boxing, wrestling, and, of course, fencing.
It was generally considered true among both habitual fencers and habitual brawlers that there was not any particular difference between hitting a man with a sabre and hitting a man with a long stick-the wound it delivered was different, but, mechanically, the process was essentially the same. All of this is to say that, when Valentine leapt at the daemonomaniac man-dropping low to avoid being shot, kicking his leg out behind him and off at angle in a technically perfect low-long-pass (called a
Nor was he altogether wrong; the blow was strong and well-placed, and good enough that the daemonomaniac lost his breath and staggered, firing wildly above Valentine’s head. However, in common with many men who have trained as fencers, but have had little opportunity to actually fight with a sword or stick, he was wrong in thinking that this strike alone would be enough to end the fight. It was Valentine’s peculiar luck-the same one thought to accompany drunks and idiots-that the daemonomaniac dropped his gun before leaping on Valentine, as the young man paused after his perfectly-executed lunge.
“Ow, get off!” Valentine said, while the daemonomaniac grunted unintelligibly, and did his level best to get his fingers around the coroner’s throat. “Shit, get…” he lost his balance, and the two crashed heavily to the floor. Valentine tried to get a hold of him, to pin him, to do something, but the man fought with the strength and reckless abandon of a madman, and the light that glared from his face pulsed and grew brighter, seemingly in concert with the daemonomaniac’s desperation.
A gravelly voice shouted, “Hold him! Hold him still!” It was barely audible over the pounding blood and adrenaline in Valentine’s ears. Another figure loomed into his vision and gripped the daemonomaniac by the neck. At once, the struggling man began to relax, his breath returning as his anger left, his voice resolving into strange, muttered inconsistencies. Valentine shoved him away.
“Beckett?” He said, when he caught his breath. “What are you doing here?”
The old man looked at him with one good eye, and one dark red pit where a second should be. He had a brass-furnished syringe in his hand. There was a tiny amount of milky-white veneine still remaining. “He’ll be out for a little while,” Beckett said of the daemonomaniac. “We need to get him somewhere copper-lined and secure, before the doppelgangers manifest again.”
Valentine nodded. “He was saying something…something about ‘it starting here,’ like that…”
“They always say that,” Beckett spat, disgustedly. “Daemonomaniacs think that they can get in touch with some kind of oracle mind so they can predict the future-it always makes them think that something terribly important is about to happen
“It’s a hallucination?”
“Probably. Who knows?” Beckett shrugged. “If you think about it, what’s ever happened that
Valentine began at once. “What am I looking for?”
“Another of those pamphlets. That’s why I don’t want this one executed, yet. I want to know where he got it.”
“Are you sure he’s got…oh wait. Here.” The coroner held up a weathered quarto with “The Causal Mind” printed neatly on the first page. “To attune oneself to the daemon that knows the precise location of all the universe’s atomies, and so to know their paths, and so to know the paths of all objects-”
“Enough. We’ll take it to the Church. Or Stitch. Get a report on it. Last thing I need is for you to come under suspicion, too.”
“I’m a coroner, Beckett.”
Beckett snorted. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but the new ministry is keeping a closer eye on us than anyone else. I can’t protect you if they want to take you in.”
“I have-”
“Your name won’t protect you either. Help me get this son of a bitch out of here.”
Grunting, Valentine slung the man over his shoulders and, somewhat wobbly, managed to get to his feet. “So, what
The old coroner shrugged. “I go to the theater sometimes. Not every day a play comes out with my name on it.”