“No explosives,” Four went on, while a sound like the buzzing of angry hornets kicked up behind him. It was the sound of musketballs whizzing by, but he did not move for cover, nor did he even appear to notice them. “No oneiric munitions, no anything. Not with these.”
Beckett heard the shouts of men struck down as they tried to climb the hill below Kaarcag and saw the weaponized, sentient foglets swirling around his feet. These were the first sign that the assault was a trap, that the Dragon Princes were prepared. They would crawl up a soldier’s leg and down his throat, trying to drain his blood out through his lungs.
Elijah Beckett shook his head. No assault. This was a raid. And the Dragon Princes were gone, he was looking for Anonymous John. This must be a hallucination. “We’ll keep looking,” Beckett said. Two gendarmes had come down the hill (Off of the barge, Beckett told himself), Gorud trailing behind them. The therian seemed, as usual, unmoved by the concerns of the humans around him, content to follow his orders and perhaps secretly marvel at man’s strangeness.
“What should we do with the boats?” Four asked.
“Just,” the old coroner began. Men began to file off the barges in twos and fours, brushing past Beckett and the gendarme captain. “Just hold them. For now.”
“The goods on them, though-”
“Can fucking wait. I don’t want to have to sort through this crap again when it turns up at the wholesalers down river. Hold the boats until we’re done.”
“Yes, sir,” said Four, as he turned to shout the order back to his men.
A gust of wind whipped at Beckett’s long coat, and he shoved his hands into his pockets, where he discovered, much to his surprise, a small scrap of paper. Mindful that this was probably a hallucination as well, Beckett did not at first draw it out, but instead listened to the wind, the gendarmes shouting, the distant sound of rifle and cannon that echoed from his past. When the paper refused to relinquish its solidity, he drew it out and read it, but was still unconvinced that it was real.
“Gorud,” he called to the therian. The ape-man obediently loped closer. “Gorud. Do you read?”
The therian shrugged beneath his ill-fitting coat. Rain had plastered his fur to the side of his head. “My people are not adept at this. I have some sufficiency at it.”
Beckett handed him the paper. “What does this say?”
“Truce,” Gorud read. “Two days. Hardwicke’s, nine o’clock. John.”
The old coroner snapped his head around with alarming ferocity. The note, had the note been in his pocket in the morning? Before the raid? He couldn’t remember, but he was sure he would have noticed. Someone must have slipped it into his coat just now, which meant one of the men, the gendarmes. One of them was a spy for Anonymous John.
The men that had brushed passed him on the docks had all separated, gone off towards their homes or back to the barracks, and even so, there was nothing remarkable about any of them. Ordinary looking men, with the ordinary compliment of eyes and noses, scars and moustaches, garbed appropriately. How long had the note even been in his pocket? Had there been someone earlier, a stranger on the street? Someone at the fish vendor’s? Had Anonymous John snuck into Beckett’s house and left it in his coat the night before?
It didn’t matter now; if there had been an opportunity to snag Anonymous John, it was certainly long gone. Beckett turned the paper over in his hand, and smiled grimly. If John wanted a truce, it could only mean one thing: Elijah Beckett was winning.
Twenty-Nine
I have discarded the mechanism for now, while I examine its course of principle action. For the imprecision engine to function effectively, the mind must be built according both to intention, that shall motivate its continued action, and restriction, that shall determine both which actions are good, and therefore repeatable, and which actions are sinful, and therefore must not be repeated. I must create a system of interactions that is the human experience in microcosm. I admit that the opportunity has made me feel almost giddy. This is my chance to finally exorcise the animal darkness from the mind, to create a thing of perfect, inerrant reason, a life truly dedicated to the preservation of life, to the advancement of knowledge, to all of man’s noble aspirations that are dragged back into the muck of his primal urges.
Old Hardwicke’s restaurant had been a staple of upper-class cuisine for more than a hundred years when it was destroyed by the launch of The Excelsior. The owner, Thom Ennering-Hardwicke-venerable patriarch of a small family that had received Estimation for the preparation of an unusually delicious bowl of smoking bishop for Agon XIII Vie-Gorgon-immediately set about rebuilding his establishment at the edge of Lantern Hill. He quickly and happily discarded years of tradition by refusing to employ old-fashioned Trowthi chefs, and abandoned the customary menu of Trowth’s old businesses-no more meat pies, smoked fish, boiled vegetables, boiled fish, smoked fish pies, or heavy, gravy-smothered roasts. Instead, he began hiring expatriate Sar-Sarpek chefs, indulging in their predilection for cream sauces, meat that had been wrapped in other kinds of meat, and things cooked with wine.
As Trowth’s distant Corsay colony began to thrive, Thom Ennering-Hardwicke’s grandson-the now-aged Bardo Hardwicke, who was no longer Esteemed due to Thom’s unfortunate decision to marry a Sar-Sarpek woman-began adding the new Corsay cuisine to his menu: peppers, fruit, fish eggs and small fried birds all joined the Sar-Sarpek fare.
Despite its changes of face and menu, one thing was always consistent about Hardwicke’s: it always thrived. Even during the Ettercap War, when wallets and purses had been strained to their breaking point, the well-to-do scratched together the money for the occasional night at Hardwicke’s.
How, precisely, Anonymous John could get a reservation there was not something Beckett considered. The reason for this particular restaurant seemed obvious, though: the building was very old, and predated the enclosure of the Arcadium; the first two storeys both had exits into that unnavigable mess of tunnels and alleys. There was no effective way to discreetly police all possible entrances, as any men stationed in the Arcadium would be spotted fairly easily in those narrow passageways.
And Beckett was certainly not interested in doing anything except policing the entrances. He had no intention, at all, of negotiating a truce with Anonymous John; his thoughts were instead occupied with how he could best secure the restaurant with his men, and seize John when the criminal mastermind finally showed himself. Not that he really expected that; there’s no way John could have really believed Beckett would do anything but try to trap him.
Still, Beckett would have been embarrassed if, in second-guessing John, he hadn’t brought any men, and then the man had showed up. It would have made for frustratingly smug dinner conversation, anyway. The old coroner had established three tables with pairs of gendarmes at them-he had gone to great lengths to ensure that the men were scrubbed clean and well-dressed, but still felt the effect lacked a certain authenticity. There were patrols of gendarmes taking long circuits through the Arcadium, making the alleys look unusually busy, but hopefully nothing more than that. In a fit of inspiration, Beckett, sent four of the therians employed by the Coroners to take up positions on nearby rooftops. Trowth was such a claustrophobic city, and a city with such an abundance of intricate stonework, that climbing about on its roofs and gables could certainly pose no more difficulty for the ape-men than climbing around whatever jungle environment they’d been bred to. This, at least, was Beckett’s considered opinion.