“Beckett? Detective Beckett?”
There was a ringing in his ears, and his vision was blurred and muddled. Beckett cough and rasped. “What. What is…?”
“It is professor Helmetag, sir. Ernst.”
Beckett bolted upright; his head spun and throbbed, but his vision cleared. He was laying on an operating table, in the warmly-lit corner of Wolfram Hall that had been staked about by professor Helmetag. The sound of spinning gears was gone, but still plucked at the corners of his awareness, now by virtue of its absence-a phantom of missing sound. The veneine high had faded, so now Beckett felt the traditional symptoms of a hangover: throbbing pain in his head, boiling nausea in his stomach, a disinterest in Ernst Helmetag’s loud voice.
“Sharpsies,” Beckett gasped. “Where…how did they…?”
Helmetag looked befuddled. “There are no sharpsies, here, no. There are no sharpsies in the city at all, I think.”
“I saw…how did I get here?”
“You were crumpled up,” Helmetag said. “On the doorstep. I thought you were a vagrant at first, I am sorry to say, and was going to report you to the gendarmerie. But I recognized…you have a, ah, a distinctive face…”
“What,” Beckett said again. “What happened?”
“You were d-injured, badly. Nearly dead. I have certain…ah.” Ernst scratched at his massive moustache. “Certain means. There was some vitality left in your cells that can be re-envigorated…”
Did I hallucinate the sharpsies? And the towers? Why would there be sharpsies in the city? “What do you mean, re-envigorated?”
“Envigorated, anyway. You must understand, it is a delicate thing, the line between the living and the dead, but you were certainly alive.”
The old coroner put his face in his hands and sighed. I would like for one year to go by, he thought to himself, without being nearly killed. “It’s fine. Thank. Thank you.” His head hurt abominably. “I need…ah.” He coughed phlegm from his throat. “Medicine. Veneine.”
“Yes, that,” Ernst nodded enthusiastically. “I hope you’ll understand. You were in withdrawal, you see? This is a very stressful condition for the body, so it was necessary to administer…well, you understand, your veins, many of them were badly damaged, so I needed to take steps…”
Beckett looked up at him. “What steps?” Ernst said nothing. “What steps?” He looked down at his forearms. Affixed to the inside of his right arm, buried directly in the pale flesh and surrounded by livid blood vessels, was a round brass plug.
“It is sealed,” Helmetag said quietly, “with ichor, much the way a knocker’s eyeplate is. I have attached it directly to your radial artery.” He fumbled in a pocket in his apron, and withdrew a few brass modules that looked like rifle shells. “Each one has a pre-measured amount of pharmacy-a combination of veneine, djang extract, and salt water. You plug it in, let me show you…” He set the shell again the plug in Beckett’s arm and twisted it.
Beckett gasped as he felt a sting like a needle prick, and then a sensation of spreading cold that rapidly vanished. Immediately, his headache and nausea subsided, the metallic taste in the back of his mouth disappeared.
“You must be careful,” Helmetag said. “These are smaller than what I think you must have been dosing yourself with. You must not increase the dosage, do you understand? Your body will acclimate, it will become very dangerous.”
“How many do you have?” Beckett asked.
“You do understand, yes? You cannot let your craving for the drug determine how much you take…”
“How many?”
Ernst went to his desk and drew out a dark, walnut-colored box. “We use these for testing on animals. I can give you a hundred now, you cannot take more than five a day. You are still sick, yes? Your life is hanging on by a thread…”
If Ernst Helmetag had any further enjoinders to caution, Beckett was not inclined to listen to them. He took the box, gathered up his clothes, and set off into the cold rain. He did not notice the faint, distant sound of spinning gears had begun again.
Thirty-One
Have solved Chretien’s problem with the eyes. The matter was trivial. Have simply built artificial eyes using lenses and a tympanum that is sensitive to light, attached to optical ganglions from a man picked from the gallows. Work on the thinking-engine continues.
Skinner had, much to her surprise, fallen into a quite natural rhythm with the Akori-and, for their part, Karine’s family were so burdened by numbers anyway that one more couldn’t possible harm them. The men spent their days working or looking for work, and brought back what little money they earned. The women spent the days at home, attending to the responsibilities of the household, and kept the money close. With so many to provide for, it was necessary to see every penny spent to maximum effect.
Of course, Skinner brought a skill-set to this arrangement that was unlikely, to say the very least, and fairly impractical to be perfectly honest. It was a fairly unusual event that any member of Karine’s extensive family required a secret passage found, a field agent communicated with, something listened to at an extreme distance, or a critically-acclaimed play written. Skinner was determined, however, not to become a useless appendage-and the Akori matriarchs were pleased with Skinner’s efforts, even if she did not possess most of the skills necessary for governing a household.
It was decided on, eventually, that Skinner would be the one to take the daily trips to Market Street to purchase groceries. Her sense of smell and touch were expertly acute, making her ideally suited to sorting ripe fruits and vegetables from their counterparts that had been sitting for too long in the cart, and her bitter anger at the injustices of the world combined with a driving need to be useful for something made her a fearsome haggler. This was how she found herself out and about in the city, two days before the Emperor’s Invocation, squeezing gogons.
It was during this expedition that Skinner heard a familiar voice-a sweet voice, a voice that would have been irresistibly charming if that charm had not been calculated to within an inch of its life. A voice that oozed humor and wit in precisely optimal amounts. A voice, in other words, that could belong to no one other than Emilia Vie-Gorgon.
“Ah, Miss Skinner,” she said. “What a pleasure it is to see you.”
“Yes? I wish I could say the same.” She chose one of the gogons-a particularly firm one, that did not seem to have any bad spots on its skin, and added it to what had become a considerable collection of the Indige vegetable.
“You are, no doubt surprised to find me here…”
“I should say that ‘surprised’ is actually a bit of an understatement,” Skinner said. “I’m not sure I have the vocabulary to express quite how astonished I am to meet you here.”
“…but I wonder if we could speak privately for a moment?”
Skinner took her burlap sack full of vegetables to the proprietor of the cart. “I don’t think, Miss Vie-Gorgon, that that’s very likely. In fact, I’m sure it’s essentially preposterous. What could we possibly have to speak about? Two crowns,” she said to the grocer, who was accustomed to a forceful parsimony from Skinner, and did not argue.
“I need your help with something.”
This was so unexpected a turn of phrase that Skinner did not quite know how to respond. She considered simply walking away, considered screaming at Emilia Vie-Gorgon, considered throwing vegetables at her, but settled for a kind of spluttering disbelief, accompanied by a few choked-out words. “You…I…you what…?”
“Improbable as it may seem, I need help, and you’re the only one capable of providing it. If we could adjourn somewhere more private, perhaps…”