“He was staying here. Beckett.” Her voice dropped to an anguished whisper. “Beckett, he let us stay at his family house and he was sleeping at the office.”
Beckett felt a sensation like his stomach had dropped out from inside him, swallowed up by some inexpressibly deep pit at the core of his being. “Shit. Shit! Okay, come with me. Now!” He seized Skinner’s arm and dragged her towards the collapsed building. Rubble still obscured most of the site; volunteers were working tirelessly to clear it. They had made a chain into the pit that had opened into the Arcadium to pass broken stone out of it. Pale, ash-smeared faces and haunted looks made them look like so many horrid ghosts, condemned forever to labor on behalf of a city that would never care for them. “Listen. Skinner, you need to listen there, all right? If he’s trapped inside, I need you to find him.”
“Is he-”
“The people we’ve pulled out so far are dead. But we haven’t found everyone, all right? We haven’t gotten to the bottom. So I need you to find him.”
Skinner nodded. Beckett could see the small muscles along her jaw clench, the telltale signs of concentration, as she swept her clairaudience through the rubble. Fear and concern would have made another knocker hasty, likely to make mistakes, but not Skinner. She was methodical, precise, thorough. If anyone could find him…
“There’s nothing…wait. Wait, there’s…I can hear someone…”
“Where? Where is he?”
“Sh! Quiet.” She opened her mouth, stretched her jaw like she was yawning, trying to listen more closely…then snapped it shut. Her face went blank. She slowly sank to the ground, besmirching her nightdress with the muck and ash that had accumulated on the cobblestones around them.
“Miss Skinner?” Karine whispered as she approached. “What is it?”
Beckett already knew the answer, but he shuddered still when Skinner spoke. “Nothing. It’s stopped.”
“Are you sure-”
“I heard his heart stop, Karine. There’s no one else down there.” Skinner put her head in her hands. Beckett leaned heavily against a stone wall that had, by some miracle, avoided collapse. They were silent as Mr. Stitch approached. It said nothing.
At length, Beckett spoke. “Get me an army. Anonymous John wants a war. I need an army.”
Stitch considered the rubble-strewn catastrophe that had one been the coroners’ office. “You. Will have one.”
Twenty-Seven
Though Beckett had demanded an army, what he got was little better than a mob. Men volunteered for his operations by the score-some were gendarmes, some were former soldiers, some were simply shopkeepers and tradesmen incensed beyond reason. Neighbors began gleefully reporting on each other, listing the criminal vices of their fellows in the prurient hope that someone they knew might turn out to be Trowth’s notorious arch-villain. Houses and businesses, warehouses, docks, and ships were raided, and some were burned. Commerce in the city practically ground to a halt, as Trowth’s population laid siege to itself.
It was veneine and djang and iron self-control that enabled Beckett to retain even a shred of command over his army. He no longer had the stomach for more than one meal a day-usually of smoked fish and kale-and slept for no more than three hours a night. He pushed himself beyond the brink of exhaustion, living in an almost trance-like state in which his mind had completely divorced itself from the sensibilities of his body, operating it remotely, fully disregarding its needs, as he rode back and forth across the city, doing his best to supervise the rapidly-deteriorating organization of his raiding parties.
During this time, the middle weeks of True Spring, chilly showers and civil unrest proved a fertile combination for the city’s pamphleteers, who sprung up throughout Trowth like so many radical mushrooms, distributing literature like it was their fungal spore. There were some pamphlets in support of the Emperor, of course, mostly paid for by the emperor himself. By far, however, the pamphleteers were closer to fomenting revolution than they had ever been in the city’s history-free now, while Beckett had seized control of all law enforcement and occupied it with chasing down Anonymous John, to say what perhaps they had always wished to. The Emperor was a tyrant, an oppressive madman, crushing the life from the city with his mad whims. Elijah Beckett was a warlord, trying to seize control of Trowth from its rightful ruler. Anonymous John was a foreign spy, trying to undermine the Empire, or else he was a criminal hero, a freedom-fighter battling the forces of oppression, or else he was a devil, the right hand of the Loogaroo come to visit upon Trowth some divine vengeance.
Somewhere in the core of this swirl of rumor and innuendo, coloring the interpretations and fueling the rebellious tendencies of the city’s most fiery ideologues, was one particular pamphlet. Elijah Beckett never saw it, because he had neither the time nor the interest to concern himself with public opinion. Elizabeth Skinner never knew about it, because the only friends she had left were too preoccupied to draw her attention to it. But it had not escaped the notice of the Emperor, and it was the subject of a public address that would later be known as the End of the Presses.
Word of the impending address had circulated rapidly among the citizens, and a throng of people filled the Royal Square in front of the dense, mismatched architecture of the palace. It loomed above the people, craggy gables and jagged merlons, forests of buttresses and arches, looking like nothing so much as a grim deity, prepared to pass judgment against those foolish enough to worship at its feet. Arrayed along the sides of the Royal Square were the closed carriages of the Esteemed Families: the Vie-Gorgons and the Daior-Crabtrees and the Rowan-Czarneckis, hidden from public view in their shrouded coaches; under mandate to attend, but under no particular obligation to permit the ordinary people to get a good look at them.
Emilia Vie-Gorgon was there, some onlookers claimed. They insisted that they had caught a glimpse of her beautiful, delicate features and her ebon-black skin through the white lace curtains of the Vie-Gorgon coach.
On either side of the square, the twin statues of Gorgon and Demogorgon stood as silent, inscrutable sentries, the last relics of the city of giants upon which Trowth had been built. Here, of all places, the sense of transgression for which Trowth was known, the sense of being a trespasser in a stranger’s garden, was the strongest. It was undoubtedly why the Emperor chose to deliver all of his speeches here. Yet, despite the natural fear that percolated among his audience-the paranoia that they were suddenly subject to as they looked over their shoulders, the abrupt uncertainty that gnawed them-despite all that, the one document that the Emperor had come out expressly to forbid circulated rapidly, passed from chilly hand to chilly hand, stuffed under coats and in shirts to protect it from the rain.
Someone, somewhere, had begun printing copies of Theocles, and selling them for pennies on street corners.
The reasons for the sale were, of course, obscure, but it was serendipitous that whatever rabble-rouser had decided to resurrect the blacklisted play had chosen to charge for it, rather than simply distributing it. The people of Trowth were mistrustful of anything given, far preferring the tacit assurance of value implied when a thing was sold. If it were free, it would have been deemed worthless, but even the few pennies that the printer demanded were enough to convince citizens of its secret value.
William II Gorgon-Vie was, after the fashion of the Gorgon-Vies, a stout man, barrel-chested and apportioned with a generous layer of fat. He was stocky enough to seem short at a distance, but was actually unusually tall. Close-up, William II’s thick-necked frame and slightly rounded shoulders gave the impression, as did most of his family, that he was in fact some kind of bull that had been trained to walk around on its rear hooves. This illusion was supported by his perpetual habit of clearing his throat and snorting.