The sun beat down on them, all unmoved by the sight. As the longboat skimmed into the water, Beckett saw Kaarcag, once dead brown and gray, now red and beautiful with blood and roses in the morning light.
Thirty-Two
Back when there were still newspapers, agitators of various stripes and dispositions would often argue that one or more laws, or failures of law, or events or institutions or what have you were absolutely essential to the stability of the city. Essays on the subject-suggesting that a failure to support the new tariff legislation on linen would lead to the collapse of the Empire within the year, or that permitting the Working Woman to return to gainful employment would bring about the city’s imminent doom, or that if the Public Theater’s production of The Country Midwife were not cancelled at once then an entire generation of children would grow up to be moral degenerates-were actually quite common. In the cut-throat world of “printed materials sold on street corners,” it was always the most alarmist demagogue who received the most attention, and therefore the highest sales. Consequently, Trowth’s doom was predicted every three or four days, and so far these street-corner prognosticators had never quite seen their predictions born out.
Perhaps this is because no contributor to the broadsheet ecosphere had ever considered the fact that the Empire’s integrity might rest on the back of one crusty old detective in the Coroners Division of the Royal Guard. Had broadsheets and streetcorner pamphlets still been legal, they would be filled with dire warnings about impending catastrophe, now that Elijah Beckett had disappeared. In truth, they’d probably be closer to the truth with these predictions than ever, as chaos swept rapidly through the city in the old detective’s absence. Without Beckett’s brutal, guiding will, the army that he’d assembled quickly dissolved into a mass of vigilantes. They attempted to continue with Beckett’s raids, though guided now by fervor instead of intelligence. They raided docks and offices, started riots with gangs and stevedores.
Not a day went by without at least one bloody, vicious fight breaking out in the streets-some unacceptably close to New Bank or the Royal district. Of course, because there was no longer any news, no one had any idea where the fights were occurring, or when, or why. Numbers and violence were magnified by gossip, which served to be the only entertainment that anyone had left. It was fairly uncommon for people to leave their homes very often in the avalanche of rainfall that constituted late spring, but even these rare trips had been curtailed. People stayed in their homes, feeling besieged, making plans for escape or emigration, or otherwise simply hunkering down and crossing their fingers.
James Ennering, formerly communications officer for the 16thQuartermasters, formerly reconnaissance partner for Elijah Beckett, now found himself the de facto head of the remains of the Coroners. Most of the men and trolljrmen, and all but one of the therians, had abandoned the division after Beckett’s disappearance. James and Gorud sat at what had been Beckett’s desk in the old pressgang office. Thut Akh Dun, one of the three remaining trolljrmen, was helping them attend to the handful of arrest reports that were still coming in. It was humid in the office-spring was like that, as it seemed one could not go anywhere without tracking in a small river’s worth of moisture-and James found it difficult to pay attention, perpetually distracted by the syncopated dripping of water from the eaves. Thun Akh Dun remained steadfast, though, in his determination to read every single report submitted by every single gendarmerie in Trowth.
With Becket gone, most of the gendarmes had stopped bothering to write reports at all; most of what came in now were notices from the more well-to-do districts, which had long been governed like police-states, anyway. Though even these notices were largely useless.
“Item: two men, miscreants. Arrested, administered corporal punishment, discharged,” Thut Akh Dun said. “Item-”
“Wait. It doesn’t say what they did? Their names?”
“No,” Thut Akh Dun replied. “Item: one woman, prostitution. Arrested, incarcerated. Item: two women-”
The trolljrman was interrupted by a commotion at the door. James projected his hearing toward it immediately, rapping lightly across the intruders who were barging into the office. Knocker etiquette prohibited such a gross intrusion using the telerhythmia, but James Ennering was exhausted beyond measure, and no longer interested in knocker etiquette.
There were two men, large men with thick chests, dragging a third between them, a man to whom they shouted repeated unsavory epithets.
“Gorud…” James whispered. “Who are they?”
“One is Beckwith Harker, he was a gendarme captain. One is a man, I do not recognize him, but he wears gendarmerie apparel. The man they have prisoner is badly beaten, I do not know him. Ho, there!” Gorud raised his voice, using the remarkable capacity for mimicry in his species to do a serviceable evocation of Beckett’s gravelly growl. “What do you think you’re doing?”
The sound stopped the men in their tracks, but when they spoke, they spoke to James Ennering. “We picked this one up doing…uh. Loitering, I guess you’d call it.”
“Loitering?” James asked.
“It is standing in a public place with an intent to commit mischief,” Gorud provided helpfully.
“All right, Captain Harker,” James said. “How did you know he intended…mischief? Thank you, Gorud.”
“Uhm. Well, I mean look at him. Sorry, beg your pardon there. What I mean is, he looks pretty much like a miscreant. He was skulking, if you take my meaning, looked like he was up to something. Officer’s discretion, anyway, sir.”
“Fine,” James shook his head. He couldn’t afford compensation for the man if he’d been arrested wrongly, but at least he could speed up his release. “So, let’s call him sufficiently punished, and now you can let him go.”
“Beg your pardon, sir, but it’s not the arrest that brings us here. It’s what he confessed to.”
“What he confessed to under duress, you mean? You’re talking about the confession that you beat out of him?”
“Well, sir,” Captain Harker said, not sounding particularly contrite. “Ordinarily I’d be in agreement with you about the unreliability of coerced confession. But this one might be worth listening to you. Here,” Captain Harker seized the man by the hair and held his head up. “Tell him, then, what you told me.”
The man coughed wetly; James couldn’t see what he was coughing up, precisely, but he had his suspicions.
“I don’t…” the man said, his voice thick. “I wasn’t…”
“Tell him,” Harker ordered.
“…I was supposed to. Scout. The palace. For routes in.”
The office was at once dead silent.
“Why?” James asked quietly.
“I don’t…know. For sure.” The man coughed again. “A man hired me to do it.”
“Tell him the rest,” Harker spat. “Tell him your deadline.”
The man swallowed heavily, hesitating, but knowing that he had little in the way of options. “He told me I had to be done. Before the first of summer.”
The first. Shit, oh shit, James thought, a deadly anxiety churning in his stomach. The Emperor’s Invocation. The only guaranteed, scheduled public appearance of the supreme head of the Empire. “Gorud. I need you to go and find Mr. Stitch. Now.”
Thirty-Three
Beckett’s lungs ached as he gulped in air, choking on the black brine of Cross the Water. He crashed in a bone-rattling heap on the fiery golden metal ground of the City of Brass, and somehow moved through it, melted brass towers swirling up around him, a cascade of color, accelerating rapidly as he fell, or rose, or moved, or else the world moved around him and he was the only place that was standing still. Eyes peered at him from crevices, but were gone in an instant. Black boneless fingers writhed and clutched at him, but had passed on before he could react. Long jaws and snaggle-teeth snapped in the dark. A circle of leprous green light lay beneath the City of Brass, and in an instant the towers were gone, high above him, shimmering clouds as he fell through clean, cold air to that glimmering green ground. Black stones gleamed under pervasive, sourceless light.