Mr. Stitch (15 page)

“That all seems,” Skinner said, after a moment, “fairly stupid.”

Deathly silence. Skinner discovered it was becoming a little easier not to find her heart in her throat when that happened, now that she was more used to it. “Yes,” said Emilia. “It is, generally. Except that the Gorgon-Vies, and this
particular
Gorgon-Vie, are wrong. I don’t mean that they’re wrong to fight with us, or to disagree with us. And I am not asserting the principle of my family, which is that
whatever
the Gorgon-Vies do, it
must
be wrong—though you would be forgiven for thinking that. What I mean is, they are
actually
wrong. The Emperor has made nothing but poor choices since his coronation.

“Do you know why he waged the war against the ettercap? Not because they were a threat to us, but because the Gorgon-Vies desired absolute control over the importation of phlogiston, rather than the shared control that had been forced on us. This is implicit in everything the Gorgon-Vies do: they believe in autocracy. That who holds the single most powerful element is the person who controls the most power. The Empire runs on phlogiston; who controls the phlogiston, controls the empire.”

“That seems a reasonable assumption,” Skinner said, recalling how close the city had come to turning into a mass grave the previous Second Winter.

“Yes? While the Gorcia pipelines were shut down, how did we get the little phlogiston we had?”

“Trains, I suppose,” Skinner said. “Indige airships.”

“Both of which the Vie-Gorgons own a controlling stake in. Shutting down the pipelines tripled our family fortune. We gave most of that money away. To charities, sometimes, or to funding certain public works projects. Do you know why?”

“I hadn’t known there’d be a test, Emilia. If I had, I suppose I would have studied harder.”

“Because goodwill is cheaper than armed guards. The Gorgon-Vies spend money to protect themselves against angry peasants; the Vie-Gorgons spend it to ensure that it’s the Gorgon-Vies with whom the common people are angry.”

“Is that what this play is about? Is that why you’re having me write it? To keep attention on the Gorgon-Vies.”

“Yes,” Emilia said. “after a fashion. An Emperor should be accountable to his subjects, shouldn’t he?”

Skinner pondered the implications of this question, and of the fact that it was Emilia Vie-Gorgon asking it. The Vie-Gorgons controlled the Ministry of Information—shutting down broadsheets, arresting and discrediting critics of the Emperor, tightly controlling what was known about him—what could any of that have to do with forcing him to be accountable?

“Certainly…” she began, “there are times when I wish that the Emperor…realized the consequences of his edicts more thoroughly.” Worrying about how to feed herself with six crowns, about where she would live when her boarding-house was closed. “Though I suppose that he is, in his mind, acting in the interests of the Empire.”

“You are quite right—
in his mind
. By his judgment, he is doing what is best for Trowth. But what assurance do we have that his judgment is correct? It was not judgment that sat him on the throne—certainly not
his
judgment, anyway. Why should we ascribe the characteristic of judgment to a man simply because he has
become
Emperor?”

“The Word? Divine provenance?”

“Miss Skinner, I am surprised. Tell me, in all your years as a coroner, have you ever seen the Word
actually
affect the world? Anything to suggest that humanity is anything except entirely on its own?”

“No, I suppose I haven’t.”

“The Word does not choose our kings. We do. And their judgment is not any better than ours—so, it seems only right that we should attempt to improve on it. Now. We seem to have arrived.”

“Arrived where?”

Emilia moved about in her seat. Skinner could hear the rustling of her skirts. “This is a hospital. One of the casualty homes.”

The casualty homes. There were a hundred of them, all over the city. A few were built from old trolljr hospices—sturdy, roomy, airy. They were great complexes where the sick were meant to be healed. Not all of them were as clean and neat as Dhagu’s hospices, though—the number of injured and wounded men brought back from Gorcia well exceeded the city’s existing capacity. Dirty heated tents, sweaty and diseased, festering with necrosis and illness, they grew like a poisoned fungus in the worst corners of the city—by the Break, and the Little Break, on the burnt remains of Mudside.

“What…what are we doing here?”

“We’re going inside, Miss Skinner.” The door to the carriage opened, bringing in a gust of chilly air. “You said you needed inspiration.”

“I can hear from the coach. The clairaudience…”

“You
can
.” Emilia stepped out into the air. “But I suspect it’s more inspiring if you don’t.”

“Wait…”

“No.”

The hospice was a makeshift building near the old Break. Skinner could hear wood creaking and the peculiar whine of stretched canvas—a low, almost inaudible hum. The inside was hot, oppressively hot and damp. Heat emitters buzzed at regular intervals around the space. Skinner was hesitant to use her telerhythmia here to establish the boundaries of the room, but based on the quality and number of voices she was hearing, it was somewhere fairly large. There was no effective way to regulate heat in a room this size; the hospice workers had no choice but to dump energy into it, or see the men freeze.

The room stank. It smelled like blood and rotten garbage. It smelled like stale sweat and vomit. It smelled like ichor and iodine. The odors whirled together in a potent cocktail of disgust that coated the inside of the throat at once, and nearly made her sick to her stomach.

Men are dying in here
, she thought to herself.
The least I can do is keep my breakfast down.

It was the sound of the place that was the worst. Above the unnerving structural rattle of its jury-rigged edifice was an orchestra of misery. The place was full to bursting; there were hundreds of men inside. Skinner couldn’t see them, didn’t know how they were arranged, and it felt to her like they must have all been crowded around her at once, whispering in her ears. They moaned, and they whimpered. Some men prayed to the Word—praying for an end to the pain, however it might come. Some men choked and puked and coughed. One man, his voice strangely modulated as though he were moving about the room like a ghost, sometimes far, sometimes painfully near, only sobbed his dry sobs.

Skinner could hear nurses and trolljrmen moving about the bodies—the former resolutely quiet, the latter with heavy footsteps and taciturn by nature. She could hear whispered entreaties by some of the nurses, and thrumming, bone-rattling responses from the trolljrmen.

Emilia led her deeper into that sour, foul place, while the voices of suffering men weighed on her shoulders like a mountain, bearing her down, building up a terrible density above her, so that it seemed that every step forward was really a step down, down into a horrific cellar well below the surface of the earth. The anguish of the men was a tunnel around her, a wall at her side, a cave that she had no choice but to descend into.

“Here,” Emilia said softly. “Joshua. Tell her what you told me.”

“You’ve been here before?” Skinner whispered, but Emilia hushed her.

“ I never thought…” a boy spoke, with a voice like an open wound. This must be Joshua. “…we all knew it was bad. But I didn’t…I signed up, though. Towards the end, when they started to give bonuses if you signed up. Since my da were dead, I thought…I thought if I signed up, I could give my ma the bonus to help her. You know?

“They put me on an ironside ship, and sent us around. Gorcia is this red place. All rocks and mountains and plants with black leaves. They gave me a gun, a long-pin rifle, and a handful of skin-colored bullets that looked like a man’s severed thumb. They sent me down into a cave, then, with a thousand other men. That’s where the ettercap all live, underground in these long tunnels. We walked shoulder to shoulder, packed tight in, men at the edges carried lanterns.

“We could smell…it smelled like vinegar. Someone said later that the ettercap make it. With their bodies, somehow, they spray it…but you could smell it. It was strong, and it got stronger the deeper we went. The caves got smaller, so only four men could walk side by side. The lanterns didn’t send light far enough ahead. Just a little bit of light at your feet. You could see the man next to you.

“When they came…there was this…sound. This chewing sound. It…we thought it was at the end of the tunnel, but it wasn’t, it was all around us. They came at us. There were openings in the top of the tunnel. We hadn’t seen them, in the dark. It was a trap. They came at us with this great…they were like claws or teeth or I don’t know…you could see their mouths. They had mouths like human beings. Lips. Little white teeth. Pretty mouths, like a girl’s. And when they come you go a little crazy, and you think, ‘I could kiss a mouth like that.’ They come at you and it’s…you can’t see anything…there’s just men shouting and you shoot your gun off and try and hit whatever you can and…

“You can’t back up, because there’s men packed in behind you. You can’t go forward, because there’s men ahead of you. You just shoot and shoot, and the men around you get snatched up or bit in half or something long and black stabs them in the heart, and if you’re lucky they’ll go away before too long. Then you start to pull back out of the tunnel and regroup. Then they send you in again. And again.”

The man was silent for a moment, then he whispered softly. “It’s dark in here. I don’t like it. Do you have any light?”

There was a faint scratch of the key in a phlogiston lantern, and Emilia said, “Here. More light.” She laid her fingers faintly on Skinner’s arm. “Joshua lost both of his hands after his second battle. His arms had to be amputated at the elbow, because of an infection that accompanies ettercap injuries. There are mechanologists working on replacement parts for him, but there are many injuries, and not much money to build brass hands for them.”

In the coach, Skinner snapped at her patron. “That was horrific. Why did you do that to me? To him?”

“Because it was horrific,” Emilia replied, smoothly. “I am given to understand that writers are rarely inspired by the purely quotidian.”

“I worked for the Coroners for years,
Miss
Vie-Gorgon. I don’t need an object example from you about how disgusting humanity can be. I don’t…how dare…how
dare
you. Do you honestly think I’m struggling with this because I don’t understand the horrors that men have had to face? Do you know how many partners I went through before I was paired up with Beckett? Three. The first was taken apart by a Reanimate in the cellar of a mansion in Swindon. Not just killed, not at first—just torn limb from limb, the way a child plucks the wings off a fly. And I had no choice but to sit and listen to it, to keep track of the Reanimate’s position so that we could send
someone else
in after it. You don’t need to…” Skinner took a deep breath, tried to tamp her anger down. “What exactly did you think I was going to do? That I’d take the misery of these men and find a place for it in the play?”

Silence as only Emilia Vie-Gorgon could be silent. Was she evaluating what she was about to say? Trying to evaluate Skinner’s state of mind, and how she’d respond? Reconsidering the whole project? Was she amused, angry, offended, or just tired?

“Well,” said Emilia, eventually. “Will you?”

“
There was no way out, trapped in that box canyon. We could neither advance nor retreat, nor move save to swing our swords to save our lives. We were surrounded and outnumbered, and we would have died there to the last of us, had not Theocles, bedecked in gore like his own armor…this is good.” The actor scratched his nose and looked at his pages again. “I like this. So, I’m going to be, what, like bloody and bandaged up here?”