orbits of sun and moon, and the passage of the planets-but it was not accurate for ordinary, civil time beyond an hour. There were no minute or second hands on the clock at Vie Abbey. So the army of mechanics who tuned the clocks, and who lost time as they traveled from church to office to market, were forced to make their best guesses as to precisely what time it was.
All of this yielded a strange wave of clock chimes throughout the city. The four-o’clock-hour, which is the hour that found Beckett on his way back to Raithower House, began with the heavy bronze thunder at Vie Abbey. Shortly after it began, the clocks nearby, with their orchestra of bells, took up the tolling, and passed it along to those clocks that were nearest to them, and so forth. The entire process, including the strange pockets of early chiming, the clocks that were hopelessly delayed, and the clocks that seemed to be under the misapprehension that it was actually eight o’clock in the evening, took well over twenty minutes, even for as modest an hour as four o’clock. During Second Winter, when the clock-tuners were much less able to effectively tend to their charges, the noon bells were sometimes known to toll for the entire hour until they began again at one.
Beckett reached Old Bank just as that neighborhood’s venerable clocks began to take up the clanging of the hour. He passed without delay through one of the many checkpoints he’d insisted on; local gendarmes, accompanied by a therian sniffer, searched passers-by for explosives on the chance that Anonymous John might take it into his mind that he should attempt some kind of reprisal. The therians, peculiarly, were unusually sensitive to the presence of the oneiric regeants used in heretical munitions. They were employed much the same way dogs were-a fact that Beckett found more than a little disgusting, but he was willing to accept it if it meant putting a stop to the attacks.
Old Bank was replete with such checkpoints, all the way into the tangled Arcadium beneath it, and it was beyond consideration that anyone might attack Raithower House with an oneiric weapon. Beckett remained fairly comfortable, then, as he walked towards the Raithower courtyard. A tall, rangy-man in a long dark coat preceded him to the gates-another early-riser, perhaps. Beckett called out to him, but his voice was drowned out by Old Bank’s clocks. The noisiest of these clocks, which had just begun to toll at Beckett’s arrival, was called Goursehead Clock; it rang four brass
The man entered Raithower House. Shortly thereafter, the building exploded.
The sound and force of the blast were muffled by the old stone walls of Raithower House itself, so the wave of pressure and heat presented Beckett with only a moment of pain and confusion. It gave way to the old coroner furiously berating himself as he saw blue-white light boil out of the windows, and turn almost immediately to the red and orange of burning wood.
Twenty-Six
Word of the fire spread quickly-so quickly that a throng of citizens had arrived to support the fire brigades before the five o’clock bells began to ring. The citizenry, ever since the devastation of Mudside during the Sharpsie Riots, was extremely sensitive to the possibility of widespread fire. Fortunately, the rain made that unlikely, but the explosion had caused Raithower house and the adjoining property to collapse, and spare hands were needed to clear away the rubble. The bulk of Raithower House actually extended well below the street line and into the Arcadium, and probably remained largely intact-it’s neighboring edifice was not quite so lucky. That house had the misfortune of being built on top of another, smaller house, which too had collapsed from the shock of the explosion, leaving a gaping pit into the city’s underside. Stone and brass slid like an avalanche into the hole, but Trowth had seen enough of misery and destruction these last few years, and if there was anyone trapped in there, the people were determined to effect a rescue.
Beckett attempted to coordinate the efforts as best he could, until the djang began to wear off and the veneine lurched forth to drag him into the dark with its oppressive grip. He sat down on a toppled bronze statue of a man wrestling with some manner of lion and watched as the dull flames were finally extinguished, the rocks were cleared away, and charred bodies were pulled from the wreckage. His eyelids were heavy; the sleepless night was catching up with him.
Mr. Stitch arrived some time after that, and Beckett did not notice the hulking reanimate, as it, too, watched the rescue efforts and took stock. Stitch stood very still, taking in every piece of information available, processing it all with its astonishing mechanical brain, breathing its deep, raspy breaths from its artificial lungs.
“What. Happened?” Stitch asked, finally? Not because it hadn’t surmised, obviously, but because Beckett’s opinion was one more datum to be collected, processed, and stored.
“Incendiary bomb,” Beckett replied. “All our security was meant to find oneiric munitions. Should have realized. Firebomb’s just as dangerous, probably easier to get a hold of.”
“Hindsight,” said Mr. Stitch, as it considered the fallen buildings. The upper storeys of Raithower house had collapsed forward into the courtyard, filling the space with jagged spears of stone and splintered wood. Beside it, a crevasse had opened up, cracking the roof of the labyrinth of understreets and vaults that made up Old Bank. This area of the Arcadium had been small flats in use by largely bachelors and students; with luck, most of them had been empty. An outer wall had fallen away from the underground buildings, leaving a honeycomb of disintegrating rooms visible from the surface. Light from the parts of the building that were still burning spattered the scene with a dusky red glow, while the rain washed dirty rivulets of mud and ash across every conceivable surface. “Inside?”
“Don’t know. I’d only just got here when the…when it happened. Don’t know who was there. Third watch, I expect. That’s…uhm.” Beckett put his head in his hands. “Heathcliff. Courton. Shit. The knocker from the low countries. What…” he took a deep breath. “Can’t remember his name.”
“Happes.” Stitch turned away from the rescue operation, and considered Beckett in its dead, passionless manner. A nearby phlogiston streetlight had lost its glass panes in the explosion, and now fountained eldritch blue light into the sky. Muddled with the red light from the fire, the lamp made everything the livid purple color of a new bruise. “Plans?”
“Plans, yeah, plans. I don’t…” This was supposed to be it, Beckett knew. The final proof. Anonymous John was everywhere, he could get to anyone, he could do anything. There was nowhere safe. John had struck right to the heart of the Coroners, and Beckett was supposed to acknowledge a superior force and surrender to it. If this had been Anonymous John’s intention, Beckett resolved at that moment to demonstrate that it represented a serious miscalculation. “All right. He wants a war, we’ll give it to him. I’m going to shut him down.”
“How?”
“I need. Everything. The War Ministry still has impressment powers, right? And the new Moral Standards Committee, their files. I want to commandeer everything, every man, every piece of information in the city, shut down every port, search every ship and warehouse.” Anonymous John’s operations had been notoriously difficult to dismantle because they were robustly decentralized-small cells operating under instructions, and barely aware of each other. And the process had been repeatedly hampered by the fact that law enforcement in the city was itself decentralized, and subject to the whims of its neighborhood commanders, to the needs of conflicting bureaucracies, the flailing inconsistency of public opinion. But John’s organization was still, ultimately, parasitic-it required the ordinary functioning of the city to survive, and had been permitted to exist for so long because it was more trouble to destroy it than it was really worth. “I don’t even care if we never find him. I’ll keep all fucking industry in this town tied up until he starves to death. I will dismantle every tiny piece of his operation if it takes me a hundred years.”
“Ambitious.” Stitch replied. As usual, no emotions betrayed its opinion on the subject. Whatever Mr. Stitch believed, it was keeping it to itself.
“This isn’t just heresy anymore, or civil unrest. He’s not just bombing some local gendarmerie. The Coroners is a division of the Imperial Guard. Attacking us is
