Mr. Stitch (43 page)

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.

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?”

“Well, eventually I started paying people to sell it. You…ah, you made a lot of money, Skinner. Anyway, the Committee on Moral Responsibility was getting dangerously close, so I had to clear out. It was then…that was when I got the idea about the log book. I’d been kind of preoccupied, you know?”

“Good enough for me.” The old man slumped in a chair. “You’ll be cleared today. You’d have been out yesterday, really, except that there’s been some…ah…administrative confusion.”

“Because of the new Emperor?” Skinner asked. Emilio Vie-Gorgon, Valentine’s cousin and Emilia’s brother, would certainly be crowned. Eventually. Some question remained as to what precise timeline that auspicious event would proceed along.

“No,” Beckett replied. “All of the ministries of Trowth function fairly well, emperor or no. They run on a kind of inertia. Most of the trouble comes when he tries to interfere. No, the problem is with Stitch gone, no one’s sure who to deliver the reports to. The Ennering kid can’t read them, and I don’t want them.”

“What…what was really going on here, Beckett?” Valentine asked.

“I don’t know for sure. But. I think that Stitch has been…’sword and fuck, I think it’s been responsible for everything. The pamphlets, definitely. The attacks…the attack on the Emperor. It replaced him with a reanimate. It’s been trying to get control of the Empire for two hundred years, at least. “

“I think,” Skinner added, “that Emilia was involved, as well. I’m sure that Stitch intended for me to right this play—though, frankly, whether Stitch was using Emilia, or she was using Stitch, I don’t know.”

With a groan and a crackle of his joints, Beckett managed to hoist himself back out of his chair. He stood and hesitated for a moment. “I don’t…I don’t know what to do anymore. They want me to retire.”

Skinner was on her feet immediately. She took a step towards him, ready to…she didn’t know what. Talk him out of it? Elijah Beckett was the bedrock of the Coroners, was in some way the foundation of her
understanding
of the coroners—what it meant to put duty above all things.

And yet, for Word’s sake, he was
old
. He’d been giving of himself, sacrificing life and comfort and basic human contact in the name of the Empire since before Skinner was born. If there was any man in the world who deserved a rest, surely it was him.

Instead of saying anything, she threw her arms around the old man and hugged him tightly, resting her face on his shoulder. After a moment, Valentine stood and joined them, hugging the two of them equally tightly.

It was perhaps past all reasonable supposition to imagine that, after this small display of human affection, Beckett himself might actually raise his arms—such as he could raise them, given the circumstances—and return the embrace. Certainly, any man or woman observing the scene who had even a passing familiarity with Beckett and his life would be forgiven for believing that no such thing was possible.

The natural world, however, is full of surprises.

Some time passed before Skinner finally spoke. “So. Now what do we do?”

“My nose is still bleeding,” offered Valentine. “I think I should probably take care of that.”

“Yes,” Skinner allowed. After a moment, she asked, “Valentine. Just…just how much money did I make?”

Emilio Vie-Gorgon became Emperor Emilio VI Vie-Gorgon at the end of that year, without raising any particular commotion. The throne of the Trowth Empire had, by long tradition, generally been passed back and forth between the Gorgon-Vies and the Vie-Gorgons whenever one or the other suffered from an insufficiency of heirs, and parliament’s approval had been long accepted as something of a rubber stamp. Emperors, it was understood, behaved according to the nature of their office, rather than the nature of their families, and so aside from certain pointed changes in civic architecture, one emperor could be relied on to be as good as the next.

During his coronation, Emilio treated his subjects to a speech that was so widely-praised afterwards as to have fallen almost immediately into the collective of quotations that mediocre men used to bolster their positions in tavern arguments.

Said the Emperor: “The days of dread and sorrow are now behind us. With bold hearts and omnipotent industry, Trowth shall stand astride the world, shall cross the oceans, shall rule a kingdom upon which the sun shall never set. Let no man say it cannot nor it should not be, for we say that it must be. If there is any passion that will deter us, it is fear. Fear of the magnificent destiny that awaits the great people of this rugged isle, this seat of power, this glorious empire.”

Neither at the time, nor ever after, did more than three people in the world realize that this speech drew quite liberally on an early, unperformed draft of
Theocles
.