“Beckett,” he croaked, or thought he croaked, or hoped he did, at least. “Beckett. It was.” He coughed again-he was dead certain of that, because it felt like someone had reached down his throat and torn out a handful of lung. He took one last, deep, gasping breath, and prayed that his voice was clear.
“Anonymous John.”
The breath left him, and the dark claimed him, and his fear rose to a roiling pitch as it did so. Constable Godwin Coates knew that the voices were waiting for him in the dark.
Twenty-Three
Have been studying the minds of my fellow men at length. Am largely disappointed. All men seem to want only to indulge in their creature comforts. Long time and effort spent carving predictable circles in which to spend their lives, just automatons made of meat and bone. What is the point of making another entity such as this?
Wolfram Hall was the official headquarters of the Royal Academy of Sciences-a lush, well-appointed townhouse on the Mile, right where the Daior-Crabtrees front met the entrenched defenses of the Gorgon-Vie architecture. The consequence of this was a very square building with very wide rooms and very low ceilings, and also an astonishing number of floral downspouts, as though the Daior-Crabtrees, frustrated by their inability to burn the building down and start over, were determined to occlude it with baroque gutter-work.
This was where newcomers petitioned for membership in the Academy, where patents were filed, where a substantial library of monographs and recent scientific periodicals could be consulted. It was staffed primarily by clerks, students at the university, and third and fourth cousins of the major Esteemed Families who needed jobs that were well-paid but not particularly taxing.
No serious scientist spent any time at Wolfram Hall, of course. The real work done by the Academy was in the Croft. At the leading edge of Old Bank, miraculously spared by the second activation of the Excelsior, was a vast complex of underground vaults, beneath what had once been the Abbey of St. Chretien. This Abbey was several decades older than the much more prominent Vie Abbey, and had been the center of religious life in Trowth for centuries before the church in Canth was disavowed and then replaced by the Church Royal. For years after that, the building served as the largest bank in Old Bank, and was indeed the bank from which that district originally took its name. After the Great Forfeiture, when all of the bank vaults were emptied in order to refill the royal treasury, Chretien’s Abbey stood disused and neglected.
All until Harcourt Wolfram, in dire need of space to accommodate his titanic intellect and increasingly-ambitious experiments, petitioned the crown for a laboratory. The Croft, which subsequently saw the birth of the first difference engines, the first aetheric translators, as well as Mr. Stitch himself, was commandeered by the Royal Academy of Sciences after Wolfram’s death, in a vain hope that the residue of his experiments could lead to even more breakthroughs that the great scientist had not considered.
The vaults in the Croft extended for more than a square mile, deep beneath the city, ancient catacombs whose purpose, undoubtedly clear to the early grammateurs who’d built it, was now thoroughly obscure. They had now become a hotly-contested commodity for the scientific community of Trowth, and were the home of the more audacious, unlikely, and undoubtedly extremely dangerous researches of the Empire.
This was where Beckett found himself on the morning after the death of Constables Coates and Frye: descending a narrow stairway deep into the belly of the Croft, to consult with an expert in necrology that he kept on retainer. Beckett had brought Gorud with him, and the therian took his surroundings in with an unflappable aplomb. Two porters carried a steamer trunk, in which were contained the remains of the black-tongued stranger responsible for the attack.
After what Beckett considered to be an utterly unreasonable number of steps, they came to the small offices of the scientists in the Croft-tiny rooms stocked with notes and notebooks, where men like Ernst Helmetag-professor of Life Sciences and Asphyxiology-could consider the results of their work.
“Ah, yes,” Ernst cried out, “Inspector Beckett, come in, come in. You men, put that there, that’s fine.” Ernst had the broad, ruddy features of the northern Trowthi, and a slight burr in his accent that was unmistakable. He wore a walrus mustache and was entirely bald. Between these features and the leather apron he wore, Ernst more closely resembled a jolly brewer than an expert in the animation of dead tissue. “Yes, now what have we here?” He paused above the trunk, then looked over at Gorud. “Ah. Is it appropriate? For that…I mean, the little fellow is surely out of his element here, perhaps he would care to wait…”
Beckett did not respond to this remark, only patiently waited for Ernst to succumb to the discomfiture that the inspector’s stony silence would produce.
“Yes.” Ernst said at last. “Well.” He opened the trunk and peered at its contents intently. After a moment, he took a pair of heavy leather gloves and a brass loupe from the narrow shelves in his cramped office, and began rummaging through sticky black goop and dismembered body parts..
“We shall take this to my workbench,” Ernst announced, as he summoned two more porters. Or, perhaps they were the same porters; the men traditionally wore linen masks over their mouths and noses, to protect themselves from deadly fumes, and were thus unrecognizable.
Helmetag’s workbench was actually four workbenches, arranged in parallel, occupying a large chunk of one of the modest-sized vaults in the Croft. Bright yellow lamps burned overhead, and a small phlogiston generator powered a large, portable incandescent light. The benches were filled with bits of metal twisted into occult shapes; jars with pickled hands, eyes, organs, tongues, and pig fetuses; long knives with straight blades, serrated blades, curved blades; and a respectable selection of glassware.
“Now,” Ernst said, “Ahm. Please don’t let…eh…the little fellow touch anything. I know you are curious!” He spoke very loudly to Gorud, as though the therian could not understand Trowthi, but an additional helping of volume might clarify things for him. “Yes! Curious! But you must not touch! All right! Now,” he said to Beckett, as he began to draw chunks of black, ichor-smeared meat from the trunk. “Now, of course, I am engaged in the study of prolonging the vitality of living tissue, yes? I do not…I must make it clear…I do not attempt to reanimate the dead tissue. Yes?” He looked around, as though to satisfy himself that any invisible eavesdroppers had clearly heard his disclaimer. “I will offer my advice, based on my experience, but of course that is not an admission of knowledge a priori, yes?”
“Yes, yes,” Beckett snapped at him. The speech was a standard part of his conversations with any of his consultants, and he was tired of it. “Just tell me what this is.”
Ernst tutted reproachfully, sucked his teeth, and began work on the remains. He laid the largest pieces beside each other, and gently flensed the remaining flesh with his long knives, revealing bits of skeleton made from brass. He exposed the flesh to currents from his phlogiston generator, applied certain tinctures that he’d extracted from his menagerie of beakers, and emitted some knowing grunts at the results. After an hour of what looked, to Beckett, like aimless puttering, Ernst explained.
“This is a quite extraordinary thing,” he said, wiping off his knives and carefully putting them back into arbitrarily chosen positions. “It is a reanimate, yes, that is clear. The flesh has been reactivated with an infusion of ichor, and provided motis vivendum by electricity. But look, do you see these bones? The bones are made of metal, and are hollow, you see? Cables run inside. Ordinarily, in a reanimate--er, that is, I am given to understand, at any rate-current is carried along the outside of the body to envigorate the muscle tissues. But these are a design to allow the current to run inside.”