Mr. Stitch

shoulders and steeling herself against the eerie wail of gibbering shatterbrained men, using her preternaturally refined senses to extract voices from each other, following echoes down ruined halls, up and down stairways, sorting out the shape of the building, prying the collage of noise apart until it became a map in her mind.

She heard Beckett’s footsteps, as familiar to her ears as her own-though slower today than she was used to-make their way towards the building, followed by the peculiar four-footed lope of the therian.

Five, she rattled to Beckett. There were bodies…she shook her head. There was organic matter in the hallways, absorbing the echoes. A substantial amount. The men…the targets had been fighting each other. Five would be easy to handle. This was good news; she could feel sorry for the dead men and their families when she and Beckett were done.

Five

There was comfort in the knowledge that Skinner was back with him. Beckett picked his way around the debris in the doorway of the blasted-out gendarmerie headquarters, and drew his revolver. The revolver was also comforting; a good, solid weight in his hand. He’d been carrying the weapon for so long it was practically an antique. He flexed his free hand, wincing as his knuckles popped, and stepped inside.

The lights had been the first things to break when the bomb had gone off. There was a little daylight that had found its way in from cracked walls and deep crevices, light already weakened from the struggle to break Trowth’s omnipresent cover of fog and pollution. The gloom inside was thick and almost palpable, barely disrupted by the narrow shafts of pale sun.

“Can you see anything?” Beckett whispered to Gorud.

The therian snorted. “No. Am not a cat,” he muttered. There was a faint rustling, and the hall was suddenly awash in blue light, as the simian creature produced a small phlogiston lantern. Gorud narrowed the beam, slightly, shining it on the black stone and charred wood that littered the floor, letting it play about the walls.

They were in a relatively large receiving room; its function in a slaughterhouse was obscure to Beckett, but as offices for the gendarmerie, its purpose was relatively clear. There was an upturned desk, splintered and broken in half, where the citizenry might have come if they had a complaint, or to make a report. There were overturned benches where people could wait, torn scraps of paper fluttering in a faint breeze, the remnants of broadsheets that had served as entertainment in idle minutes.

There were bodies scattered across the floor. Half a dozen at least, and most twisted and sprawled away from the center of the room. Beckett surmised that they had died in the initial blast, dying mercifully as a result of physical trauma, instead of the unbearably painful psychic damage of the munition. The throbbing pulse of freed-up psychic energy beat around them; surfaces, even under the dim glow of Gorud’s lamp, took on peculiar textures and characteristics, impressing colors into Beckett’s mind. Stone suggested it might be sticky to the touch, wood seemed like paper, about to be snatched away by an unseen hand. The floor…the floor was wet, damp, brackish water over dark brass…

Skinner rapped on the floor at his feet. Five. Beckett sighed with relief as he realized that the coding of her telerhythmia was perfectly clear to him-as easy to understand as any conversation. He had not been losing his mind; the new knocker really just was unintelligible. She relayed the positions of the men still in the building. Two on his level, three more on the floor above. This was a small blessing; at least the three men on the second floor would be unlikely to escape.

“What is it?” Gorud asked him, his voice pitched low.

“She’s telling me where the targets are. Two down here. You have a weapon?”

Gorud made a sound like a cough. “No. We are not permitted.”

Stupid. Why would you let someone join the Coroners, and not give them a gun? “If things get tight, stay back, keep the light on them.” Becektt considered just how helpful the creature would be in a fight. Moving on all fours, he was about as high as Beckett’s waist. It was hard to be sure beneath the heavy coat and thick fur, but the coroner suspected that Gorud’s frame was replete with strong, rangy muscle. Still…unarmed, against a strong man? “Run if I tell you to. Understand?”

The therian made that same coughing sound. “Yes.”

Beckett nodded towards a yawning black doorway at the far end of the room. Gorud moved towards it, one hand holding the lantern aloft, the other on the ground, helping him move. Beckett followed close behind, gun ready. Skinner rapped softly at his side, letting him know how close they were. Three raps, spaced evenly, represented his distance. The faster they came, the closer the target was. It was an unnerving process; the rapid taps could make anyone tense.

Three taps, very close together, and Beckett knew they were practically on top of the man. He could just faintly here the madman’s muttered glossolalia.

“There,” Gorud whispered, and shone a light down a narrow hallway. It fell on a shadow in the shape of a man, white eyes glittering in the dark. The man looked up at Beckett and screeched, pronouncing syllables in a language the old coroner had never heard, if it was a language at all and not just the meaningless gibbering that all lunatics held in common.

Beckett’s weapon kicked, hard, as he put a bullet between the madman’s eyes. The man fell back as though his feet had been kicked from under him, and hit the ground as still as stone. Easy. This is easy. This will be easy. “One more on this floor,” Beckett told the therian. “Then we need to find the stairs.”

They found the second man in an adjoining room. He was huddled in the corner, the body of another man sprawled out in front of him. There was something black and sticky about his mouth; it was impossible to tell the color in the blue lamp-light, but Beckett had a fairly good idea of what it was.

The man just looked at them as they entered, and whispered to himself. “…she didn’t know she was me, if she’d known she’d have been, she’d have been, she knew, she’d have been somewhere. Somewhere else if she was. Somewhere-”

Beckett shot him in the face; he twitched, and lay still. While he waited for the spots that the muzzle-flash had left to clear from his good eye, the coroner took the opportunity to open his revolver and dump out the two spent shells. He reloaded and snapped the weapon closed. “Come on,” he told the therian. “Upstairs.”

There was a sudden rap at his side, an irritated quadruple-rhythm on the wall-the telerhythmic equivalent of a curse. “Skinner. What is it?”

She tried to tap something back to him, but there was now a second phantom rhythm on the wall, a garbled mess of long and short sounds, that made communication impossible. Shit, he thought to himself. “Whoever else is listening, be quiet. I can’t understand what you’re saying.” There was a pause, and he heard Skinner’s rapping again. He had time to make out a word, “Trouble,” and then the second knocking returned, louder this time, loud enough that Beckett was worried it would be overheard.

“Be quiet,” he insisted. “You are drawing attention. I need you quiet,” he spat through gritted teeth. After a moment, Skinner’s telerhythmia vanished, and Beckett was left with the new knocker, who softened his voice, but could make himself no better understood. “James, I know that’s you. I need you to get me Skinner. I can’t read you. Do you understand me? I can’t tell what you’re saying. Let Skinner talk to me.”

Silence, for a moment, and then James’ garbled knocking stubbornly returned. Beckett turned to the therian. “Can you understand this?” Gorud silently shook his head. “Crap.” The old coroner adjusted his coat. “Crap. Crap. Crap.” The veneine high was beginning to fade; the warm blanket that protected Beckett from the pain in his joints and the aches in his muscles was beginning to unravel. A sharp spike drilled into his knee. “Upstairs,” he whispered.

The path upstairs was by a narrow stairway at the far end of the hall. The steps were wooden-old and nearly rotten, and the creaked and crackled as Beckett climbed them. The therian followed, his long arms and prehensile feet giving him confidence in the face of the structure’s potentially catastrophic failure.

The muttering of damaged minds was just audible when they reached the second floor, spilling down the cramped, claustrophobic hallway, from any one of a number of rooms with crooked, broken doors. James’ knocking along the walls was no help; he used some means, unfamiliar to Beckett, to describe distance and direction. It didn’t sound like speed or volume, and the coroner found himself disinclined to take the time to puzzle it out.