“You,” he said to Valentine. “Come with me.”
Outside of the undercroft Vie Abbey brooded, dark and substantial, a compact fortress atop a hill, a contrast to the sprawling tangle of buildings, arches, and towers that comprised the Royal Palace at the other end of the city. Trowth spread out between these two illustrious edifices, along the iron-black ribbon of the River Stark. Dry, icy air whipped about Beckett and Valentine, as they made their way past the ten kirliotypists that Beckett had hired, past the two great trolljrmen-largely protected from the cold by their bulk, but their feathered crests still held in close-past James Ennering, the new knocker, as he sat in the coroner’s coach and tried to coordinate everything.
Beckett took Valentine to a nearby djang-house. It was crowded; during Second Winter, the people of Trowth more easily overcame their natural standoffishness, as the desperate need for any sort of heat or warmth drove them to huddle close, to pack into pubs and shops, even to stand a little nearer each other on the street. Second Winter was an enemy that every man shared in common, and led them to great lengths that they should keep it at bay.
Still, the charcoal suits and the grim mandate of the Coroners bought Beckett and Valentine a little space in the dark, hot, suffocating djang-house, and a small table in the corner. Valentine immediately ordered a cup of the stimulating djang; Beckett asked for nothing, and only scratched at a persistent itch by his eye.
“This,” Beckett said, as he placed the quarto on the table, “I don’t know what this is.”
“It’s a pamph-”
“I know it’s a pamphlet, Valentine. I mean, I don’t know where he got it. I’ve never seen anything like this before. It looks like an instruction manual for ectoplasmatics.”
“Well, maybe that’s what it is.”
“Ectoplasmaticists don’t like instruction manuals. They don’t like writing things down at all. So, where did this come from?”
Valentine pursed his lips and held the quarter up to the dim lamp at their table. “Well, this is definitely Southend parchment; that’s the cheapest one you can get,” Valentine Vie-Gorgon’s family was the Vie-Gorgons of Comstock Street. They had, in an effort to distinguish themselves from the more famous branch of the family-the Raithower Vie-Gorgons-succeeded in establishing a near-monopoly on the printing industry of Trowth. “I think you can buy a ream of it for a half a crown. The type’s Flood New Face, which is the kind they use on those new typing-machines. You could make this in your own basement, if you wanted.”
Beckett nodded. He’d suspected as much; even if an ectoplasmatist had managed to conquer his natural reticence over print, there’s no way he’d risk taking heresy to a genuine press-but those new machines were cheap, and widely-available. “Read it,” he told the younger man. “Tell me what you find.”
“Don’t you…” Valentine trailed off, a little awkwardly.
The fades that had been ravaging Beckett’s body had, recently, passed on to his left eye. The whole orb was invisible, leaving yet another dark, bloody red hole in his face and making him look even grim and skull-like. The eye was completely blind, as the creeping transparency caused whatever it touched to fail. Between his vanished eye, transparent nose, and the hole in his cheek that showed off his white teeth, Beckett looked horrifically grim-a man already dead, still lurching through life by nothing more than the sheer force of his obdurate will.
“My eyes,” the old coroner said, “Aren’t what they used to be.”
Two
After nearly a decade of drawn-out conflict, messy skirmishes, costly, bloody occupations, and disastrous engagements, the Ettercap War finally ended.
In fact, the details of the victory were never fully-established by any of the many broadsheets, though speculation was rampant.
The Ministry of Information, tightly-controlled by the Raithower Vie-Gorgons, quickly and quietly silenced any of the papers that were too critical-though they were perfectly content to allow the propagation of the most outlandish rumors. The presence and persistence of these entirely unbelievable claims at least served the illusion that all points of view were being expressed in the broadsheets. The Vie-Gorgons preferred a light touch when it came to affairs of state, and the more their involvement could be disguised, the better.
With the end of the war, thousands of soldiers, many of whom had been forced into service against their will, were brought home. Many, if not most, were crippled-often with legs, arms, hands, feet, or eyes missing. Some were crippled psychically, irreparably damaged by the oneiric munitions of the Ettercap. The remainder, healthy as they may have seemed, all nursed the trauma of the dragging, dirty war in Gorcia. They were taciturn men with wan faces, who wanted no company but their own. They were uncomfortable around bright lights and enclosed spaces. At night, they gathered in each other’s homes, and sat in tense, silent circles, and if some sense passed between them, it was invisible to the world outside.
In response to the return of Trowth’s young men, women who had been called up to work in their absence were sent home. Some women, pleased to see their husbands, brothers, fathers, and sons returned to them- damaged though they were-were happy to leave their work to the men. Some, accustomed to the agency that employment had provided, resisted. During Second Spring, they demonstrated; they wore sashes and marched in front of government buildings. During Second Winter, when the sub-zero weather made public demonstrations potentially lethal, they published pamphlets, articles, monographs. They held meetings in their homes and discussed what it would take to enable them to return to work. Thirst wetted with a taste of equality, they began to consider even more drastic and improbable ideas: equality. Independence. Suffrage.
William II Gorgon-Vie reacted to the mounting unrest in his capital city in the traditional style of the Gorgon- Vies: bluntly. He declared the formation of a Committee on Moral Responsibility. Their mandate passed directly from the Emperor and into the world: they were to prevent morally salacious ideas from becoming commonplace. Committee members sent agents to all of the publishers at once, to ensure that no more incendiary tracts were printed. They went into every ministry, every government institution, every business that had even the smallest effect on social policy, and delivered the Emperor’s message to the women of Trowth: “Thank you for your help during the war. It’s over now. Get out.”
This was how, after six years of loyal service, Elizabeth Skinner lost her job with the Coroners. She was summarily dismissed, without even her last week’s salary. In fact, because the Coroners had continued to employ her for a full month after the formation of the Committee on Moral Responsibility, there had been veiled threats that
When the political officer-a thin man in a tweed suit, one of the lesser Gorgon-Ennering-Daior cousins-had come to Raithower House to demand compliance, Beckett had only sat, sunk deep into a chair in the sitting room, glowering. Forty years in the Coroners, and he’d become used to being jerked around by politics and bureaucracy. He’d learned that there was no way to fight it, or avoid it, that it wasn’t given to him to decide the rules, only to do his job within them as best he could.
It had been Valentine-naturally-that had risen to her defense, and nearly gotten himself arrested for assaulting a Committee member. He had attempted to defend her quite forcefully. For her part, Skinner had quietly collected her things and gone home.
