Mr. Stitch (14 page)

“Steeplechase,” Skinner said, with a sudden burst of inspiration. “And Mumbletypeg are their names.”

They spoke mostly gibberish; Skinner borrowed liberally from the weird monologues that she’d heard dream-poisoned men spout off, or the terrifically peculiar rants of a man deeply lost on veneine. But in the middle of those weird speeches, they spoke directly to Theocles. They hailed Theocles as a general, and a king, and told him of an impossible future.

No grown adult in Trowth would admit to believing in bogeys—not anymore, anyway. And few of them would confess, except in their darkest and most private moments, to believing in the Loogaroo. Only on quiet, lonely nights, on desolate windswept roads, when that solitude transmuted into an unbearable feeling of
presence
, when men and women picked up their paces and hurried back to well-lit parlors and warm fires, would a person acknowledge that there were times when they still feared a fairy-tale like the Loogaroo.

The Loogaroo was the king of the bogeymen, the Nightmare Prince. It was a dark shadow of a thing, a wicked dissonance in the nature of the Word. The Goetic Church still insisted that the Loogaroo existed, and was present as the black cruelty in the heart of every man—an actual, living entity that, in some small way, possessed a portion of each and every human being’s soul. It was an evil, but a necessary evil, meant to give dimension to the Word. Good, the Goetic Church said, is meaningless without a corresponding wickedness. The Church’s position is why a play suggesting that a doctor of theology might secretly be a servant of the Loogaroo—a play like
The Bone-Collector’s Daughter
—would have been condemned as heresy in Canth.

The Church Royal, on the other hand, maintained the official policy that the Loogaroo was simply a metaphor for mankind’s native tendency towards wickedness. The various bogeymen named as its subjects—often given allegorical names like “Lust,” or “Greed,”—were simply poetic personifications of natural phenomena. It was
real
, but not really what it seemed to be.

Skinner liked the bogeys in the first scene; there was still enough of a sense of mystery, a willingness to indulge in fantasy, among the Trowthi people that their monstrous prophecies
could
be true, but a history of painting the creatures as conniving, scheming demons meant that Steeplechase and Mumbletypeg could just as easily be liars.

As though rediscovering the Loogaroo had burst some levy in her imagination, scenes and incidents and speeches began to pour out of her. Theocles making a pact with the Loogaroo. The bogeymen summoning the Loogaroo. The Loogaroo haunting the coronation ceremony, finding a place for itself at the celebratory banquet.
Just write it all,
Skinner thought to herself, as they worked through dinner and late into the night.
Just keep writing it, we can always cut it out later.
By nightfall, they had produced no fewer than seven full scenes, and a dozen more speeches and snippets of dialogue that Skinner liked, but wasn’t sure what to do with.

When they had finished, Skinner slumped in her chair and absently scratched at the edge of the silver plate across her fate. She had been snacking on a small piece of roast that the maid had brought, but now found herself ravenously hungry.

“Why do you think,” Karine asked, her chair creaking as she leaned away from the Feathersmith machine, “that Miss Vie-Gorgon wanted
this
play?”

“Oh, who can say with the Families? They’re always up to something obscure and confrontational. The Wyndham-Crabtrees and the Crabtree-Daiors own the Public Theater, don’t they? Maybe just a way to draw the audiences off from there.”

“It sounds…
Theocles
sounds like, a little bit like what the Emperor is like. Now, I mean.” She coughed lightly, then added, “Word preserve him.”

“Yes, it does sound like that.”

“Do you suppose he’ll be mad about it?”

Skinner was quiet for a long moment, apprehension and pride warring over her face, vying for the chance to change it to a frown or smile. “If I were quite honest with you,” she said, smiling as her apprehension about what she was risking by writing a play like this lost out to the pride she took in her ability to do it, “I would say that that is precisely the point.”

I believe I have met with some success. I have devised a calculating engine, vastly different in design from our ordinary engines. This new engine relies on a kind of imprecision, an accommodation of likelihoods rather than precise calculation. It therefore does not require that all elements of a question or problem be input directly into its mechanism, but can act and calculate beyond its own parameters.

I have done this through the use of
[lacuna; three pages of the journal are excised by the author. In their place is the following note:
“As I suggested, certain events have come to light which make me loath to share my methods. I am not altogether confident that this experiment will result in a positive outcome. Until I am sure of it, I mean to keep my procedures from the world at large, for fear of unexpected consequences.”
]

--from the journal of Harcourt Wolfram, 1785

Stuck. A month in, and Skinner was stuck. Dead in the water, floundering, as unable to think of a decent simile as…as someone who was stuck. Emilia would be by today for more pages for the actors to chew on, and Skinner had absolutely nothing to give her.

The first few scenes had gone easily enough. Once she’d worked out the bits with the Loogaroo, a panoply of material had presented itself, ripe for the plucking. And then, when she’d run out there, she just started adapting scenes directly from the poem, changing bits here and there to mesh with her idea for the piece. And now she’d reached a point where everything that might reasonably be stolen from the poem was stolen, and everything inspired by her flirtation with the symbolic dark heart of humanity had done it’s inspiring, and Skinner had no idea what to do next. The play wasn’t hanging together, didn’t feel real enough, didn’t feel like it mattered.

She would not tolerate being the author of an inoffensive drama. The sort of play that might be enjoyed by a few wealthy families, and then filed away in one of the Groheim collections where it would sit among equally unspectacular dramas, minding its own business on someone’s bookshelf while audiences spent their nights out lusting for meatier fare. Her play would fascinate and hurt, would land like a punch to the gut. It would make people sit up and realize…

Realize what? Skinner didn’t know. She could hear Karine, waiting bored and patient by her machine, ready to resume the work. Skinner sat with her chin in her hand, tapping her cane against her shoe, waiting for an idea.

No one
, she thought to herself,
is going to realize
anything
if I never finish the damn thing
. She likewise was starting to grow concerned again about where she would live, and what she would eat. Emilia Vie-Gorgon was certainly generous, but it was doubtful that she was generous enough to provide so much without the expectation that Skinner would produce something.

“Miss?”

Skinner sighed. “Karine, let’s…take a break for now. I don’t have anything to write today.”

“Miss Vie-Gorgon is going to be here this afternoon. She’ll want to see pages.”

“Yes, I know. I’ll talk to her.”

There was a pregnant silence then, a kind of silence that Skinner recognized: the sound of a person who was hesitating to say something.

“Yes?”

“…I don’t…Miss, I don’t want to worry you, at all, but…”

“It’s all right, Karine, just say it.”

“Well. I like working for you, miss. I’d like to keep working for you. So. So, I suppose…”

“I suppose I’ll have to think of something soon, right?”

There was another pause.

“Yes, miss,” Karine said, slightly more enthusiastically. “I’m sure you will.”

“Hmph.” Skinner returned her chin to her hand, and slumped in her chair as Karine bundled up her things and left. She would be out window-shopping for hours. Karine was a very frugal young woman, and did not make extravagant purchases even now that she was, comparatively, quite flush—but she took a great pleasure in
looking
at fancy and expensive things, in imagining her life with them, in imagining what it would be like to be able to purchase a new silk dress for every day of the week entirely unmindful of the cost. This imaginative pleasure ensured that her trips around town were both long and unremarkable.

Emilia Gorgon-Vie arrived sharp at two, while Skinner had spent the intervening time somewhat guiltily enjoying the pleasures of her house. She was sitting in the bedroom, experimenting with a new musical scale that she’d heard at a djang house, recently, when Emilia’s man came knocking.

Skinner did her best to explain the situation as plainly as she could: that writing a play was not like building a chair, or tallying a ledger. The work was not there, waiting to be done, but it could only be done when the author was of the correct mind to do it. And this was a fickle, slippery condition, not subject to deadlines or motivation, but only through inspiration. Art cannot simply be commanded, or produced to order, it comes only in its own time.

She managed to deliver the entire explanation with a single, convoluted sentence, avoiding giving Emilia the opportunity to interject a question or a comment. But she was destined to have to stop talking eventually, and when she did, she’d have to suffer the Vie-Gorgon heiress’s response.

That response, as Skinner had expected, was silence. Emilia Vie-Gorgon’s peculiar absolute, untouchable silence that, if it persisted for too long, was liable to make a blind person believe that the young heiress had actually left the room. They’d nearly passed this threshold, Skinner holding her breath ever so slightly, Emilia dead silent, when the woman finally spoke.

“Very well, Miss Skinner. If you’d care to come with me?”

“Ah. Yes? Where?”

“To my coach, Miss Skinner.” Her voice was icily controlled, perfectly modulated, utterly inexpressive. It was an emotional feat that Skinner felt was quite unprecedented. “I’ve something I think you might be interested in.”

As ominous as this sounded—and Skinner could not deny that the whole thing sounded very ominous—she could think of no practical reason to refuse. It was not as though she was doing anything else, at the moment. She put on her coat, and joined Miss Vie-Gorgon in the young woman’s coach, where they sat in quiet for several moments.

“Do you know,” said Emilia at once, giving Skinner a mild start, “Much about my family, and the Emperor’s?”

The Vie-Gorgons and the Gorgon-Vies—of course Skinner knew
of
them, and knew as much about them as was published in the broadsheets, or taught in history class. “They…you have been feuding for six centuries. About the legitimacy of Owen Gorgon.” Owen Gorgon was a hero in Trowth. He appeared at the end of the Interregnum, and claimed to be the last descendent of Gorgon himself. He’d married Elthea Vie—whose family could reliably trace their ancestry back to the first cousin of Agon Diethes—to cement himself in the Empire, and had crowned himself ruler.

The Gorgon-Vies asserted that Owen Gorgon was in a line of legitimate offspring from Gorgon, and so the Gorgon name ought to come first. The Vie-Gorgons insisted that, since there was an interruption in the line of legitimate Gorgon heirs, Owen must be an illegitimate child, and therefore the Vie name should come first. The family had split, with cousins all taking one side or another, and thus was born the defining relationship of the Empire.

“The feud began,” Emilia said, “over the legitimacy of Owen Gorgon and his name. But while we fought, we were obliged to take positions against each other on principle. If the Gorgon-Vies advocated for a stronger monarchy, the Vie-Gorgons lent their support to a stronger parliament. If the Vie-Gorgons favored an isolationist policy regarding our neighbors, the Gorgon-Vies immediately proposed an aggressive one. If we favored slim towers with narrow windows, they started building square buildings with wide ones.”