knock him senseless among the rocks.
Elizabeth Skinner stepped back away from the ledge. She was sorry about losing her sword, but there was little for it now, she knew, as she made her way back to retrieve her shoes.
Thirty-Eight
If the sun was up, Beckett didn’t know it. His eyes suffered a new time and a new universe; even the blind eye could see in this weird new world, that shimmered beneath a light that seemed to come from somewhere in the depths of his own skull. Past and present had come together in a still picture that showed all moments as one moment. The flow of time had collapsed like a bridge above a river, leaving only a jumble of steel and concrete, sinking into the depths without order or context. Gone was the menace of the desiccated Dragon Princes and in its place a strange pastiche of memory and conjecture. Kaarcag towered to his left, the red brick fortress-city atop a mountain that grew above Trowth and reached out towards the moon and the black shapes that crawled across its surface. The royal palace roiled to the right, a bubbling congeries of towers and arches and buttresses. Beckett seemed to see not just the palace itself, but the palace as it was when it was first built, and simultaneously every version and variation that had existed since then. They displaced each other, fought for prominence in his eyes, and all the while beneath the palace rumbled the Clock, the grand ticking Clock, the inexorable grinding spinning whirling Clock that governed all of Trowth with its immutable predictability.
Beckett found that he could look back down the Royal Mile and see his childhood there, spread out in crystal-clear relief. His father dying, eyes red and nose bleeding because of the blood fever. His mother wept, her loss eternal. His first day of work in the factory where he breathed in the aerosol fluxion that had poisoned him. The day he first joined the Royal Marines.
The slaughter that was the Kaarcag Expedition crawled up the imaginary hill that led to that stone city. Muzzle flashes were frozen spots of bright white light; clouds of smoke rose from the men’s guns who, trapped in the amber of Beckett’s memory, had no hope of eluding the brain-dead dummies that fell upon them. Beckett’s ship floated on the mirror stillness of the bay, where Sergeant Garrett was endlessly torn apart from the inside by those chimerstric vines.
The vines crawled from the water and up to the elevated train tracks, where Beckett could see the shattered coach from the royal train, could see himself paused in the middle of his desperate lunge across the broken tracks above the Soder Pass. Beckett saw himself stabbed above the Stark, saw himself falling into the icy river, saw himself pulled from it by strange figures. He saw Anonymous John and his sickening blank visage everywhere; above the river, on the bay, at the factories. He saw him peering out of windows and looking down from ledges, saw him lurking in back alleys and beneath the streets. Anonymous John moved, but was only the faceless tool of another guiding hand.
The gendarmerie exploded, a flower of shimmering silvery light, like the northern aurora, a pulse of pure unearthly dream emanating from a muddy, filthy stone cocoon. The daemonomaniac, horribly contorted in the basement of the Raithower House, which was somehow still whole but turned in such a way that both inside and outside were visible at once, and also
The road he walked looped back around itself, took him in circles around the city, or else it took him through his life which circled around itself, manipulated and transformed by that merciless hand. How much of his life was managed in this way? How much of the life of the city was under this invisible sway? How much of the Empire?
Where the sun rose in the east was an empty square, awash in the sunlight of the First of Summer, devoid of the Emperor and the crowds who would hear his invocation. Above it, or behind it, or before it was that same square, packed with men to hear the Emperor ban the printing presses and cripple the flow of information that was the lifeblood of the city. Only there still was information, pamphlets and documents and quartos everywhere, they fluttered in the sky like snowflakes or flocks of birds, cartwheeling above Beckett’s head, suspended before his eyes. They were papers about heresies, about chimerstry and daemonomania and oneiristry. They were seditious pamphlets about the Emperor’s tyranny and how loyal citizens must raise their hands against him. One was a play about a man who thought he was only doing good but who had himself become a tyrant and a monster, and who was still guided by that omnipotent omnipresent hand.
At the end of the road the two grand statues of Gorgon and Demogorgon stood, old and new images superimposed atop one another-now they were worn beyond recognition, now rendered in exquisite detail, two vast figures decked in armor but they were not men at all, not indige or sharpsie, but something else, something strange, something incomprehensibly alien. They were gone, empty space where statues once stood, and they returned, all points along the timeline existing at once.
Some small part of Beckett’s mind was lucid somehow, despite the shock and the staggering amount of drugs he had imbibed. It was sure that he had gone quite permanently mad, that the rest of his mind was damaged beyond repair and would never be quite the same again. And it wondered how even the least among the daemonomaniacs could withstand even the barest touch of the infinite mind of the Daemon, the omniscient but unthinking mind that knew every speck of dust, every atomie of the universe. Sublimation into the aethyr would be a mercy.
Gorgon and Demogorgon stepped aside as Beckett approached, or else the road widened as he came near the palace and forced them apart, or else they had never truly been there in the first place. Beckett walked or stumbled, he could not say which-perhaps he floated, buoyed along by the strangeness that burned in his veins- through the main square which now was crowded with open faces that looked upon him with concern. Was it now? He was not sure but supposed it must have been. Hundreds of faces looked at him, and scattered among them were those hideously flesh-colored spots of blankness that were Anonymous John.
Beckett ignored them and no man made a move to stop him. He wondered at this only briefly, until the lucid flash in the back of his mind pointed out that he still carried his gun in one hand, and had somehow regain his coroner’s shield, which he now waved about. Men fell away like water before the prow of a ship and Beckett wandered as in a dream up the stairs and into the galleries that surrounded the square. These were meant for diplomats and advisors, ministers and members of parliament, the wealthy scions of Esteemed Families, but no one tried to eject him from these honored rooms. He ignored the moustached men in their clean suits, cavorting with their wives and mistresses. Ignored the Crabtree-Daiors and the Rowan-Czarneckis and the Wyndam-Crabtrees, the Daior-Vies and the Ennering-Vies and the Rowan-Vies. Sadness may have touched his face as he passed by the Vie-Gorgons, a sympathy for their mutual loss; even through his delirium, Beckett felt the bitter sting in his heart still when he thought of Valentine, saw Raithower House a frozen eruption in the midst of the city, but the old man was consumed now.
Consumed with the desire to see the source of that strange hand, consumed by the need to follow the sound of turning gears, the gears of the great royal Clock that thundered beneath him, the gears that turned in the heads of men and women, the gears that grew louder and faster and more frenetic, more dangerously swift, the deadly high-pitched whine of a machine on the brink of self-destruction. Beckett staggered, bereft of any more personal will, carried instead by the aggregate power of his visions, into a private gallery with no chairs, only a low table on which sat singed folders filled with clippings from the broadsheets. A gallery that looked out upon the podium where the Emperor, against all tradition, would offer his Invocation three days after the first day of summer. A gallery where Beckett found the mind made of turning gears that was behind it all, behind every movement of the cities innumerable tiny cogs.
The source of the horrors he had seen, men murdered, destroyed by heresy and science, all designed and directed by a cold, dead hand. The monster that had seized the Empire by the throat. The thing that owned the name, the last name signed in the Black Library’s book.
