Mr. Stitch

“Hail, men of Trowth! We stand in harmony with the Word!”

As the speech began, the filthy man reached beneath his ragged costume and began to draw two beautiful, silver-plated revolvers. The Lobstermen saw him at once, but in the precise moment before they fired, another gunshot rang out from a gallery above the square.

The Lobstermen all turned to face it, moved to protect the Emperor, to engage the assailant, confusion setting in as they drew a bead on their new target, only to hear more gunshots, dozens of strange echoes. A man in ragged shirt-tails, with a morbid visage, a face so ravaged by disease that it looked like a skull-a man with a black iron revolver firing wildly into the crowd. He appeared in a half a dozen places simultaneously, unrestricted by the laws of physics.

The Royal Guard fired back instantly, as they attempted to ascertain the nature of this new threat. Their bullets struck the strange phantoms, which dissolved into jagged, fractured lines of causality.

And in this moment of distraction the beggar aimed his revolvers and fired both of them, round after round into William II Gorgon-Vie’s chest.

Gunshots rippled across the square, the grim-visaged man appeared and disappeared, each causal doppelganger finally being borne down beneath the Lobstermen’s gunfire.

The man who smelled like sewage was tackled hard by the men around him. He was beaten soundly, but not killed. They held him tight, instead, intending that he should be taken into custody.

After some moments of pandemonium, during which the milling crowd turned to near-deadly panic in its attempt to escape the confines of the square, the gunfire ceased. The strange man’s spectres had all disappeared, the mad beggar was restrained, the Lobstermen cautiously ceased their fusillade. The crowd had almost completely evacuated the Royal Square.

When the Lobstermen attained the balcony where the first shot had been fired, they found Elijah Beckett comatose and half dead, and Mr. Stitch. The huge reanimate had been shot in the head five times. The miracle difference engine that was its conscious mind was now a fine scattered sand of impossibly tiny gears. Its body stood, still vital and held in place by the heretical chemistry that had created it. Its brass eyes betrayed no evidence of the changed condition.

The men held the Emperor’s real assassin to the ground and discovered that his beard was false, and had only been glued on. The looked up towards the Emperor who, despite having eight holes in his chest, was still standing. He cocked his head to the right, again and again. Opened his mouth to speak the same words over and over:

“We stand in harmony with. We stand in harmony with. We stand in harmony with.”

From the bullet wounds in his chest, black ichor bled in thick, gummy rivulets down his suit.

Forty

It was some days after the incident before Skinner was finally able to meet the Emperor’s would-be assassin. He was being held under arrest at a temporary facility in New Bank, a townhouse owned by the Vie-Gorgon family. Skinner was admitted, dirty, disheveled, and haggard as she was-having been wearing the same clothes since her untimely departure from the Akori household-with a minimal amount of fuss. Someone had indicated to the men on duty that she might be expected. She strode in, her telerhythmia furiously rapping on every available surface. It ruffled papers into the air, nudged chairs out of position, and swung a portrait of Farrier Vie-Gorgon so forcefully on its nail that the painting fell from the wall and crashed to the floor with a resounding thunk.

“You,” Skinner said, as she entered.

“Hello!” The man replied.

Skinner walked up to him and slapped him across the face. When he did not immediately respond, she began hitting him in the chest and stomach. She caught him a good blow to the solar plexus, and he doubled over and began coughing. “You asshole. You irresponsible miserable stupid asshole.”

“Here, I thought-”

She punched him, hard, right in the face. Not quite hard enough to smash his nose completely, but enough to draw blood, and enough to knock him back into the small sofa in which he had been lounging. “You’ve been missing for months. For fucking months, I thought you were dead, you fucking bastard!”

“Yes, but-”

“For months, you let everyone think that you’re dead, and then what? What’s the first thing that you decide to do? How do you announce your presence to the rest of us peons? Is it with a letter? A note? No! You try and kill the bastard Emperor.” Her fury spent, Skinner sat down with a huff in the chair opposite. “You are lucky I lost my sword, Valentine, or I would stab you in your neck.”

“I think you broke my nose,” Valentine said. She couldn’t see that his face was still yellowed with old bruises from the beating he’d already taken during his apprehension.

“Good.” Skinner crossed her arms and effected a scowl; the silver plate across her eyes spoiled the effect somewhat, as it tended to cause all of her expressions to blend into “serious but enigmatic.” After a moment, she asked, “How did you know, by the way? That he was a reanimate?”

“Look…I’m sorry about all of that.” Valentine leaned back against the couch and held his nose. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you, but my plan was kind of dangerous, you know? I didn’t want you to be implicated, because I didn’t think that both of us should go to jail, and then I couldn’t find you…ow, Skinner, my nose really hurts.”

“Good,” Skinner asserted. “What plan?”

“Yes,” rasped a new voice from the door way. “What plan?”

Elijah Beckett looked somewhat the worse for wear. He was wearing his gray suit, as usual, but had put on his heavy gray overcoat to stave off a chill. His hair was thin, and his good eye had a pronounced dark circle beneath it. The skin that was left visible was paper-thin and pale, before it dissolved almost entirely into vivid gore. The whole right side of his face had been consumed by the fades, down nearly into the bones, exposing spongy red marrow in his cheeks and jaw. His speech was slurred faintly; his lips seemed to have trouble forming words. “What plan?” He asked again.

“Beckett…” Valentine whispered, his voice tinged with awe. He managed to collect himself. “It was nothing to do with…with the thing. That I did. It was for Skinner, I was trying to do her a favor-”

“Then how did you know about the Emperor?”

“I…” Valentine paused. He wiped the blood from his nose, sat up straight in the chair. “I just. I knew.”

Skinner wondered about that. About Valentine, watching his family’s business seized, his mother and father and brothers and sisters driven into exile. Had he worried about her, too? Stuck without a job, without prospects, shoved aside despite all her hard work by an ungrateful emperor? Had he seen what William II had made of Trowth? Had Valentine known at all?

“You knew,” Beckett repeated. He sounded as though he had barely any strength left at all. “You knew. Because you went back to the abbey, and looked in the book. You saw Stitch’s name, you saw that he’d been to the Black Library. Realized he must have been responsible for the heretical pamphlets we’d found. Put it all together. Somehow.”

“Somehow,” said Valentine, after a long, pregnant moment. “Yeah.”

“So, your plan didn’t really have anything to do with the Emperor?” Skinner asked. “What were you doing?”

“It didn’t at first,” Valentine replied, his voice unaccountably cold. It warmed as he spoke, though, almost to the point that he sounded like the old familiar Valentine. “At first I was just doing Skinner a favor, like I said. It was dangerous, but I just realized, I knew where we kept some of the old presses. There were a couple in an old printer’s shop in the Arcadium that no one had used for a few years. So, I thought, ‘Well, Skinner just needs money from her play, right? And nothing’s more popular to read than something you’re not supposed to.’ So…I…well, I printed up a bunch of copies of Theocles and started selling them.”

“You sold my play?”