The very thought made Skinner wonder just how much Emilia had been involved in the other attacks. It was hard to say, because what little Skinner knew of it had only come from the broadsheets-and one could fully rely on the papers to exaggerate outrageously whatever scant details they managed to get a hold of-but the thought had accompanied a mounting terror. If Emilia was involved, the extremity of her willingness to do harm was staggering. Commissioning a scandalous play was almost absurdly childish compared to what the Vie-Gorgon girl was capable of.
And Skinner knew that Emilia was involved in the assassination attempt. There was no way that she would permit Skinner to live.
Skinner let her telerhythmia rattle along the walls as she found her way towards the heart of Trowth. She knew that people often confused the sound of telerhythmia with the sound of a heavy rain, but no knocker had difficulty sorting them out. The telerhythmia was clearly sharper and crisper, the echoes jumped out at the ear and snagged attention in a way raindrops didn’t. She made her way through mostly deserted streets, guided by her preternatural senses, until she came to the cramped doorway that led to Backstairs Street.
Backstairs might have actually been a street at one point, a short connecting alley between a courtyard and Watchmaker’s Close perhaps, but once Irwin Arkady had catastrophically changed the topography of Trowth, someone had had the bright idea to build a staircase here. What Backstairs had been called before it was a stairway was a piece of information lost to the abysms of history and apathy. Skinner paused at the top of the stair, stretched her clairaudience down its length. She heard nothing but the labored breathing of a far-off transient and the omnipresent drip of water and leaking pipes.
The Arcadium wasn’t the best choice, it was just her only choice. The summer meant she had little chance of freezing to death, and the sheltered tunnels would provide some protection from the worst precipitation that Trowth had to offer. All she had to worry about was catching scrave from a plague rat. Or being attacked by a vampiric foglet. Or being stabbed by a beggar. Or, obviously, being found and murdered by Emilia Vie-Gorgon’s assassins.
But at least she wouldn’t be rained on.
As she stood at the top of Backstairs Street and prepared to embark on her new life as a vagrant, she checked again for the footsteps that had been following her for the last half-mile. Footsteps, much like telerhythmia, jump out to a knocker’s ear; they were a sound that floated right to the surface of the world’s sea of noise. It was a mistake to try and take a knocker by surprise if you were just going to follow them. Two sets of steps, evenly-spaced. Heavy, purposeful. Booted feet, men’s feet, walking steadily towards her. Skinner reached out with her clairaudience to ascertain what she could about the men. One ground his teeth. One was smoking. Based on a man’s gait and how high above the ground his breathing was, Skinner could estimate his height. Based on the volume of his footsteps, she could guess at his weight. These men were both much bigger than she.
“There,” one said, softly, not realizing how absurd it was to whisper while Skinner was listening for him. “There she is.”
At least, Skinner told herself, it’s not a bomb. She fled into the Arcadium.
Pogo Akori eventually established the story of Skinner’s absence, at no small difficulty, from his sister Trine. Trine, of course, wanted to go after the Trower-woman right away. She called him a heartless monster when he said no, said his soul had turned to black filth like the soul of a Trower, that his grandfather would be ashamed of him, and offered many other colorful and cruel insults. Pogo remained philosophical on the subject. Was the Trower woman in danger? Perhaps. But it was her danger, and she would know best how to solve it. If they pursued her into the night, they would likely do more harm than good. And, after all that, Skinner had been trying not just to preserve herself, but to preserve the Akori, as well. If they followed her and were harmed, would this not make her sacrifice meaningless?
“We will do what we can when we can,” Pogo insisted, “But we will not follow her, because she asked us not to.” And that was that.
When a tall, rangy Trower man in a deftly-tailored but somewhat rumpled suit arrived at the Akori household later that day, Pogo was true to his word. While his family glared at the stranger, Pogo insisted in broken Trowthi that no, only indige lived here. No one named Elizabeth Skinner. No Trower women at all. The man believed him, or seemed to, and his face took on a disappointed air as a consequence. He offered his apologies and left them with a pamphlet that he had drawn from a pocket inside his coat.
Pogo Akori, in order to improve his command of the Trowthi language, spent a great deal of time reading, and this practice had given him a keen hunger for words-a hunger that had only sharpened since the day that the Emperor had shut down all of the presses. Maybe the stranger was a murderer, but Pogo had sent him on his way with no clues as to Skinner’s whereabouts; he considered his obligation discharged, and so there was no point in not enjoying the chance to read.
He settled into his chair while the children shrieked and the matriarchs gossiped as they cooked, and began to leaf through the pamphlet the man had left. Pogo saw, with some surprise, that it was the script for a play.
It was called Theocles.
Thirty-Six
The engine is complete. The body that Chretien has built is serviceable, at least. We have envigorated the entity earlier this evening. I can hear a faint buzzing from the engine, which I have installed in its skull. The eyes, of course, are without expression.
And yet, I feel certain that the creature is looking at me.
Beckett stalked along the streets of Trowth through the steady summer rain. Dark crevices looked back at him from beside the street, beneath which lurked the Arcadium and, he knew now, any number of attendant dangers. There were eyes, he was sure, in those dark corners, there were men waiting for him with purple dents in their foreheads, ready to scream their fervent fealty to the Dragon Princes. Crooked streets and crooked buildings loomed over his head, sometimes bedecked with the flowers and birds of the Crabtree-Daior household architecture, sometimes they were squat and square like the Gorgon-Vies’, but the most disconcerting of all were the long narrow arches and peaked roofs that belonged to the Vie-Gorgons. As Beckett walked deeper and deeper into the city, those sharp black gaps looked more and more like teeth or talons, at rest right now, but humming with a need to reach out and commit murder, as though the city were a great beast only resting lightly on its haunches to lure other, less wary cities to their destruction.
It was too hot for his coat and Beckett had left it at home, wearing his pistol openly on his belt. He had kept the scarf wrapped around his cadaverous mouth and nose, but his empty eye socket still glared with blind menace at anyone that saw his face. He mindlessly fumbled with the empty brass cartridges in his pocket. Among them was a new cartridge, one he’d had specially made by the scientists at the Croft.
“You’ve been using too much of the veneine,” Helmetag had told him. “We don’t know…you understand, we don’t know how it reacts to what else is in your system? This is dangerous.” But he handed the cartridge over, anyway.