Mr. Stitch

“Right, sorry. Adronus’ big thing was, ‘A war is over when the opponent thinks he’s lost. A battle is just a pointed argument.’ He used to say that wars were really just stories…”

“War is narrative,” Skinner suggested.

“Yeah, like that. Have you been…why do you know about Adronus?”

“I was…it’s just something I heard, once. I thought you might know.”

“Well, that’s suspicious. Why would you think that I knew anything?” His voice held a bold grin.

Skinner snorted. “With all those years at fancy schools, I was sure you were bound to recollect something, particularly if it was useless. At the knocker school they only taught us skills.”

“Well, la-di-da. For your information, gentlemen aren’t supposed to need skills. That’s what we have butlers for. And tailors.”

“That’s just like the Families, isn’t it? Sustaining their lifestyles on the backs of their servants.”

Valentine laughed out loud. “Careful. That kind of talk is generally frowned on in places like this.” The music picked up, as the fiddler found his second wind and joined the indefatigable harpsichordist. Skinner and Valentine danced again, and twice more before the night was over.

The idle rich spent late nights, as morning held no particular urgency for them. It was close to dawn when the last, most devoted partygoers finally dispersed, all wavering drunken smiles and over-friendly hands. These were the gentlemen who, now that their late-night’s entertainment had waned, would probably find some other dissolute venue in which to practice their only particular ability: hedonism.

Skinner had waited until the end, hoping for a brief word with Emilia, but, after her enigmatic conversation with Nora Feathersmith, the Vie-Gorgon heiress was nowhere to be found. Her major-domo helped the guests gather shawls and coats, and politely but firmly showed them the door. Valentine found her a coach, and repeated his embarrassingly sincere offer to buy her lunch.

The sun had nearly risen by the time Skinner returned to the house in Lanternbridge. Skinner could not see the sky turning red and angry with the day, the clouds unusually thick for Armistice, the black towers of soot pouring from smokestacks as the factories started up. She could not see the sprawling mass of the royal palace, highlighted against the sun, nor the vast expanse of her city stretched out beneath the meager light. She could not see the empty windows, the darkened doorways that looked like so many unfriendly eyes and mouths, yawning open to disgorge their bleary-eyed occupants.

But she could feel something-a hot breath of air, stirring from the south and whipping through the streets, tinged with the bloody taste of burning phlogiston, the acrid smell of smoke and industry. A humming energy, beneath the city’s ancient streets, a powerful sense of immanence that surged through the drowsy morning like so much summer lightning.

The truth was that knockers often had such feelings-experiences of unnamable dread or imminent danger, that many times had no reliable connection to the world. And Trowth was a city that lent itself well to such strange sensations, even among its less-sensitive inhabitants. Under the best of circumstances, gargantuan, weather- beaten Trowth was a city that felt haunted by the heat and cold, by damp chills and strange agues. So it was reasonable, and perhaps forgivable, that Skinner thought nothing of the feeling, and collapsed into her bed having given it hardly a second thought.

Seventeen

Beckett sat in his office, brooding. He had for the first time that year opened the heavy, green copper-plated shutters on his windows, an indulgence he permitted himself only during the two weeks of Armistice. These were, in fact, the only two weeks when the weather did not bother him in some way; warm enough not to cause his bones to ache, cool enough that he could still wear his suit and scarf without sweating. It would be an exaggeration to say that Armistice is the only time of the year that Beckett actually enjoyed, as “enjoyment” is perhaps too strong a word to describe what Beckett felt about anything, but certainly one could say that Armistice was the two weeks of the year that Beckett found to be the least intolerable.

Ordinarily. Now, the lightening sky and cheery, amiable atmosphere of the city rang hollow in his ears, a false front of friendship piled up, after so many years of tradition, on top of Trowth’s ever-rotten core. There was not, Beckett had been forced to conclude, anything sacred. This was not a revelation that struck him like a thunderbolt, but rather a slow, seeping realization. After many years of work in the Coroners, he had learned that most people did not hold most things sacred, and that those things that above all demanded respect for their sacredness were the ones most likely to be ignored. But he had hoped, or else imagined, or at the very least considered that there were in his world one or two things that everyone chose to respect.

“Should have known better,” he muttered to himself. He looked at his desk, cluttered with paperwork for cases that he would never, could never solve. He felt the ugly weight of the gun in his hand. His mind drifted back to his last conversation with Mr. Stitch.

“You perceive. A. Connection?” The hulking reanimate, still as a corpse behind its desk, had wheezed at him.

“There’s no question,” Beckett had replied. “The pamphlets that are being circulated, they’re all made at the same press. We don’t know where it is, but we’re going to find it. I want to move on these men, now.”

“Impossible.” Stitch replied. “We. Cannot. Find them.”

“You didn’t find anything?” Beckett asked. “Anything at all at the gendarmerie bombing site?”

“Nothing.” Stitch’s voice betrayed no emotion except the constant pain of having to be used at all. “The site. Was entirely. Devoid.”

“We can’t…” Beckett had begun. He felt his voice grow hoarse, and worried that it would crack. He wondered how he could be so desperate about something, after so much time spent in the regular, dispassionate slog of his work. “We can’t let this go. We have to do something.”

“So. Find. Something.”

That was it, and it was depressing. If Stitch and its miraculous engine of a mind couldn’t find anything to connect the bombing and the daemonomaniac and the mysterious pamphleteer, then there was little hope that Beckett would be able to. No leads, no anything, like so many of his cases these days. The number of crimes that could be connected to one of the heretical sciences seemed to grow exponentially, but the tools he needed to prosecute his investigations remained stubbornly old-fashioned. Ask people if they’d seen anything. Question notorious career criminals-this was a tradition, and a fairly useless one; since heretics were executed on the spot, there were generally very few people who could rightly have been said to have made a career of them. One advocate in the Royal Academy of Sciences insisted that it was possible to determine a heretic by precisely measuring the shape of his head, but he wanted funding for his experiments before he could produce any worthwhile results, so that was fairly a bust.

Nothing. Beckett looked down at his gun again, felt the black iron call to a black spot in his heart, numb and raw and cold. He stared at the barrel, watched it grow, stretching out to encompass him, its dark, empty core drawing him down, down into it with an inexorable gravity. The principle seemed remarkably easy. The barest twitch of his finger would be enough, the gun would do all the work. Wasn’t it quite extraordinary that so much pain, so much weariness, could abolished with such a small, simple step?

“Mr. Beckett?” The boy’s voice was soft; he had crept into Beckett’s office without the old coroner hearing.

“Alan?” Beckett shook his head and looked up. Of course it wasn’t Alan, Alan had disappeared, escaped to Corsay probably. It was James, the new knocker. His face was pale and pinched, his jaw always clenched as though he were perpetually fighting back nausea. Ruddy light from the windows reflected off of his silver eyeplate. The plate had been set improperly, and now a string of syrupy black ichor dribbled down his cheek. “James. What?”

“I…”

“What is it, boy? Speak up,” Beckett snapped at him, as he set his revolver back on his desk.

James sighed, but said nothing for a long moment. Then, “I was in Gorcia, did you know that, Mr. Beckett?”

Beckett allowed, privately, that he had indeed known that, though he hadn’t given it much thought. To the