Mr. Stitch

“Item-”

“Wait. It doesn’t say what they did? Their names?”

“No,” Thut Akh Dun replied. “Item: one woman, prostitution. Arrested, incarcerated. Item: two women-”

The trolljrman was interrupted by a commotion at the door. James projected his hearing toward it immediately, rapping lightly across the intruders who were barging into the office. Knocker etiquette prohibited such a gross intrusion using the telerhythmia, but James Ennering was exhausted beyond measure, and no longer interested in knocker etiquette.

There were two men, large men with thick chests, dragging a third between them, a man to whom they shouted repeated unsavory epithets.

“Gorud…” James whispered. “Who are they?”

“One is Beckwith Harker, he was a gendarme captain. One is a man, I do not recognize him, but he wears gendarmerie apparel. The man they have prisoner is badly beaten, I do not know him. Ho, there!” Gorud raised his voice, using the remarkable capacity for mimicry in his species to do a serviceable evocation of Beckett’s gravelly growl. “What do you think you’re doing?”

The sound stopped the men in their tracks, but when they spoke, they spoke to James Ennering. “We picked this one up doing…uh. Loitering, I guess you’d call it.”

“Loitering?” James asked.

“It is standing in a public place with an intent to commit mischief,” Gorud provided helpfully.

“All right, Captain Harker,” James said. “How did you know he intended…mischief? Thank you, Gorud.”

“Uhm. Well, I mean look at him. Sorry, beg your pardon there. What I mean is, he looks pretty much like a miscreant. He was skulking, if you take my meaning, looked like he was up to something. Officer’s discretion, anyway, sir.”

“Fine,” James shook his head. He couldn’t afford compensation for the man if he’d been arrested wrongly, but at least he could speed up his release. “So, let’s call him sufficiently punished, and now you can let him go.”

“Beg your pardon, sir, but it’s not the arrest that brings us here. It’s what he confessed to.”

“What he confessed to under duress, you mean? You’re talking about the confession that you beat out of him?”

“Well, sir,” Captain Harker said, not sounding particularly contrite. “Ordinarily I’d be in agreement with you about the unreliability of coerced confession. But this one might be worth listening to you. Here,” Captain Harker seized the man by the hair and held his head up. “Tell him, then, what you told me.”

The man coughed wetly; James couldn’t see what he was coughing up, precisely, but he had his suspicions.

“I don’t…” the man said, his voice thick. “I wasn’t…”

“Tell him,” Harker ordered.

“…I was supposed to. Scout. The palace. For routes in.”

The office was at once dead silent.

“Why?” James asked quietly.

“I don’t…know. For sure.” The man coughed again. “A man hired me to do it.”

“Tell him the rest,” Harker spat. “Tell him your deadline.”

The man swallowed heavily, hesitating, but knowing that he had little in the way of options. “He told me I had to be done. Before the first of summer.”

The first. Shit, oh shit, James thought, a deadly anxiety churning in his stomach. The Emperor’s Invocation. The only guaranteed, scheduled public appearance of the supreme head of the Empire. “Gorud. I need you to go and find Mr. Stitch. Now.”

Thirty-Three

Beckett’s lungs ached as he gulped in air, choking on the black brine of Cross the Water. He crashed in a bone-rattling heap on the fiery golden metal ground of the City of Brass, and somehow moved through it, melted brass towers swirling up around him, a cascade of color, accelerating rapidly as he fell, or rose, or moved, or else the world moved around him and he was the only place that was standing still. Eyes peered at him from crevices, but were gone in an instant. Black boneless fingers writhed and clutched at him, but had passed on before he could react. Long jaws and snaggle-teeth snapped in the dark. A circle of leprous green light lay beneath the City of Brass, and in an instant the towers were gone, high above him, shimmering clouds as he fell through clean, cold air to that glimmering green ground. Black stones gleamed under pervasive, sourceless light.

Beckett looked around him to see new towers made of black stone, windowless, crooked black fingers reaching up from the poisoned earth, clutching at the sky, stretching up and up. At the base of those towers moved things, incomprehensible things, things that were not so much shapeless as they partook of all shapes, all at once, agglomerations of limb and eye and mouth, utterly alien in construction. Beckett blinked, and in the fraction of a second that his eyes were closed, he saw long jaws again, and sharp teeth, he saw hands reaching out for him.

Blink. The basalt towers loomed again. Green lights like fireflies the size of fists floated in the dark, the eerie luminescence at the source of those mad figures, swirling around each other in an unfathomable dance.

Blink. Jaws and teeth, claws, closer, grabbing for him…

Blink. The towers were close now, close enough that he could reach out and touch them, touch the smooth stone foundations, the vast and seamless architecture. How could there be no seams? No individual stones? Were they carved from some single, vast source? A fallen meteor, the size of a city, etched over countless eons…

Blink. They had him, the hands took hold of him, sharp nails dug into his arms.

Blink. The city was all around him, dwarfing him to insignificance. The black forms of the City of Brass were here too, snuffling around in the dark, their boneless fingers, writhing like…Leeches, their fingers are leeches, Beckett thought, as behind them floated those incomprehensible forms with their green glowing, firefly-lights. The Leech-fingered Men. Hobgoblins from children’s stories, now I know I must be dreaming, the men snuffled at the ground with faces that were just nests of hooked barbs, pulsing and quivering according to some invisible stimuli. The basalt towers shivered, and at once Beckett felt himself the object of their scrutiny, as though the featureless black surface housed innumerable imperceptible windows, through which glared millions of malevolent eyes. The leech-fingered men halted their aimless sniffing, and, as though they were all appendages guided by a single mind, turned their faces towards him. The firefly lights continued to bob in the dark, causing a strange and tangled mass of shadows.

Beckett tried to flee; he could not move so much as he could will the city to move around him. And yet all places appeared to be same place, all routes the same route. Black towers raced by, all leaning together above his head, reaching to some point in the infinite distance, and still he was surrounded by these buildings the height of mountains, by the swarms of leech-fingered men and their gnashing barbed faces.

Blink. The gnashing barbs were sharp teeth again, the green light turned black and cold…

Blink. Surrounded, he was surrounded by these things, as the green lights danced around him, inconsiderate of his presence, engaged in some inscrutable ritual, the invocation of some grand and alien intelligence. The leech- fingered men took hold of his arms, the slimy tendrils digging their sucking mouths into the skin, a thousand tiny pinpricks of pain, and he was sure that they would drain the life from him. They stretched him back, and he could see the tower tops above him, still endlessly reaching with geological slowness toward the shapes above…a circle like the moon, but fat and heavy in the sky and colored with swirls of blue and white.

Blink. Hands squeezing tight, tearing him apart, pulling, his heart felt like it was broken in half…

Blink. The lights floated above him, the shadowy mess of form that supported them writhed in silent confusion all around the edge of his vision, and though no limbs materialized from that sprawling chaos, still he felt something reach out to him, reach past the barrier of his skull and brain, place its toxic fingers inside his mind, a greasy stream of substance that coiled up inside his head, piling upon itself, growing and throbbing in his ears and he screamed, screamed then…