“Why would someone do that?”
Ernst harrumphed, as though speculation on the motivations of necrologists was a pointless exercise. “Who knows? Well, perhaps. I couldn’t say for sure…”
“Guess, then.”
Ernst twisted the end of his mustache for a moment. “Let me ask instead. Where did you find this thing? It was not, I suspect, used in a conventional way.”
“No,” Beckett said, pensively. “No, it wasn’t. It was used to deliver a munition. An explosive…ah.”
“You see? Perhaps.” Ernst shrugged.
“Brackets and cables are notable. An internal electrical system would enable the reanimate to pass for human. At a distance, anyway.”
“It’s unusual. Erm. So I’ve heard,” said Ernst. “Necrologists do not usually try to make humans, but to make things that are more than human. It is a strange thing to make a reanimate that is indistinguishable from a man.”
“Yes,” Beckett replied. “Yes it is.” The phantom itching in his eye was suddenly abominable again, and he began to rub at it. “All right. Reanimates that can pass for human. There must be a way to recognize them.”
“Ah, yes,” Ernst replied. “Yes, yes. The blood, you see, is replaced by ichor, which is black. So, tissue that is ordinarily red-tongue, lips, and so forth. Also, the eyes. Ichor does not preserve the eyes, and they will quickly dissolve. Yellowing first of the sclera, unusually large pupils, then weeping of the aqueous humour. I cannot imagine that these…things…should be useful for more than a week, unless some new method has been found to preserve the eyes.”
“All right, professor,” Beckett said, at length. “You’ve been very helpful.”
“Yes, of course,” Ernst Helmetag replied. “Yes. Mr. Beckett. This is all not usual, is it? Something is happening now.”
Beckett did not know what to say to that, so he said nothing.
Twenty-Four
“Believe me, I understand where you’re coming from,” Valentine was saying. “Loyalty. Loyalty is a great thing, and I respect that, I really do. But you’ve got to consider you options here.” He was sitting opposite the prisoner, Sergeant Charles Codrington, formerly of the Royal Army Light Supply Division, who pouted in the most distant corner of the dank cell beneath Raithower House, where he was chained up pending his trial. “Which is to say, you haven’t got any options. We’ve got witnesses, evidence that you were dealing in oneiric munitions. You understand that this is heresy, right? You’re getting a trial only because you were in the army, and we can’t execute you on the spot. But the army isn’t going to let you off easy, you know that, right?”
The Sergeant was one of the two men apprehended on Beckett’s Bluewater raid, and Valentine had been trying to coax information out of him for what seemed like centuries. He refused always, just sat in the back corner of his cell, bloody and bruised from the beating he’d taken at the hands of the gendarmerie. He stared out into the distance, as though Valentine weren’t there at all.
“So, whatever John is offering you, it’s not really worth anything, because you can’t spend it when you’re dead. Or even when you’re locked in prison for the rest of your life. That’s assuming a best-case scenario, mind you. And whatever protection John’s offering…you have to know he can’t protect you anymore, right? We’ve got you. You’re here. Anonymous John needed a city-wide riot to get himself out of jail last time, how do you think he’s going to get you out? Why do you think he would bother?”
The man said nothing and Valentine sighed. He thought that Sergeant Codrington’s cellmate, a former grocer’s assistant by the name of Hawkes, was a more promising prospect for obtaining information, but the man had mysteriously choked to death on his dinner the night before. The entire endeavour seemed unlikely to yield results. Valentine was about to renew his persuasive efforts when Beckett returned.
“No luck, yet?” Beckett asked him.
“No.”
Beckett snorted. “Go home. I want to talk to him. Alone.”
“I’m. Not sure that’s a good idea, Beckett.”
“I didn’t ask. Go. Now.”
Valentine did as he was ordered, because he could think of no reasonable excuse not to. Once Valentine had left, Beckett, very slowly and methodically, began to unwrap the scarf from around his face, revealing the hideous bloody rents made by his gradually vanishing flesh. First he exposed the bare orbital bone below his eye, then the black gap where his nose should have been, then the hole in his cheek that revealed his teeth. When he had finished, he let the scarf drop to the ground, and began to gently tug off one of his gloves.
“You know about the fades, Sergeant?” Beckett asked. The Sergeant said nothing. “I’ve had them for more than forty years, which is, as I understand, a record. They usually kill you in ten.” Beckett removed a key from his pocket and unlocked the cell door. “No one’s sure where they come from. They eat your body away, very slowly. Fingertips…” he showed his bare hand, with the bone-white tips of his distal phalanges visible through transparent flesh. “Your nose, ears. Eyes. When the meat turns clear, it dies, and starts to rot away. There’s no way to stop it, or slow it down. Nothing.” Beckett took from his other pocket a small knife, and gently drew a line across his palm, so that livid red blood spilled out from it. “Once you’ve got it, you just start to disappear, until your bones crack and your lungs give out and your heart stops, and there’s not a damn thing you can do about it.” Beckett knelt down in front of Sergeant Charles Codrington, his palm now bloody. “You’re not afraid to die, I can see that. And you’re not afraid of a lifetime in prison, if the army goes easy on you. But you’re still going to tell me what I want to know, because I know how people catch the fades.” He held his bloody hand close to Codrington’s face. The Sergeant jerked and tried to pull away, but was held fast by heavy chains. “It’s through the blood, Sergeant. And I promise you, you will give me Anonymous John, or you will choke on my poisoned blood. I will give you the fades, and let you loose, so you can spend the next ten years of your life watching your body die. In a decade, when you’re trapped in a wheelchair, and you’re blind and deaf, and you can feel your heart lurch with every second beat, you’re going to wonder what you thought was so great about what Anonymous John had to offer.” He seized Sergeant Codrington’s jaw, smearing blood on his face, forcing the man to look at that black, empty eye socket. “Or, you’re going to tell me what I want to know.”
The Sergeant talked then, at length, and in detail. Beckett used the information to plan his next raids. Anonymous John had not, historically, been a figure with whom Beckett had had much contact-the gangster was a murderer, yes, a smuggler, and a thief, but only in mundane, ecclesiastically-approved ways. He had never before stepped into the field of scientific heresy, and so there had never been an onus on Beckett to interfere with him. Now, though, that John was trafficking in oneiric munitions, providing daemonomaniacal regeants, and building reanimates, he had become Beckett’s enemy, and Beckett was determined to make him regret it.
He took his first steps towards that end the day after Armistice ended, when the chilly spring rains rolled in from the bay like a curtain of water, condemning Trowth and its citizenry to two or more months of terminal dampness. Hidden by the iron-gray precipitation that suffused the air, Beckett assembled more than a hundred local gendarmes and twenty-five Lobsterman-as well as a support crew consisting of fifteen trolljrmen and their ambulance tarrasques-and surrounded a complex of warehouses on Front Street, right where the city dropped precipitously into the bay.