The name he saw, the last name signed before Valentine’s own, nearly stopped the old coroner’s heart. The world shattered and vanished, time became a twisted knot. Beckett’s life disappeared and he wondered then if he had known anything at all, or if he had always been groping blindly in the dark.
That name.
Beckett fumbled the new cartridge from his pocket, a small glass capsule, filled with a glimmering green fluid. Etherized flux. The reagent of the daemonomaniacs. He pressed it to the socket in his arm, and felt the sparking pain of heresy in his veins.
Thirty-Seven
Egg and his partner, (who was called Six-Fingered Will, despite having the ordinary, requisite allotment of ten digits), were not supposed to actually have to kill the woman. Their principal, who always contacted them anonymously, had assured the two thugs that they were a contingency plan, set in place only in the unlikely event that Elizabeth Skinner seemed like she was going to abandon the house in Bluewater. Whatever plan was in place, it was supposed to occur with a minimum amount of participation from Egg and Will, the go-to strongmen for the Dockside Boys.
Plans change, however, and Egg at least was phlegmatic about unexpected events. He considered himself a kind of philosopher among hooligans, adapting to a new scenario with intellectual aplomb, ready for whatever the world might throw his way. He didn’t expect the universe to change on his behalf, is how he thought of it, and that made it easier for him to deal with the problems that necessarily beset him and his fellows.
Six-Fingered Will was noticeably less phlegmatic. He complained bitterly when Egg insisted that Skinner was leaving the Bluewater House for good. He offered that they should give up following her, and just report back that they’d lost her. He asserted that he didn’t like the rain, and it was surely no good for his health to be wandering around in a warm summer shower. Six-Fingered Will was not the man with whom Egg would have preferred to do this job, but he adapted.
They pursued the knocker to the entrance of Backstairs Street, and watched her cock her head to one side, like a cat.
“There,” said Will. “There she is.”
The woman at once disappeared into the dark down the stairs.
“Do you think she heard us?” Will asked.
Egg shrugged.
“Do we really have to kill her? She’s as good as dead down there, anyway. Blind girl down in the Arcade. I heard there’s sharpsies there.”
Egg shrugged again. He was growing less and less tolerant of Will’s complaints. “We’ll do it. Come on, it won’t take long. Hurry, before we lose her.”
The two men jogged towards the doorway and down the stairs. They followed the sound of her footsteps-after a moment of consideration and heated argument about precisely which direction said footsteps were coming from-down one dark, covered alley, and through a curved connecting tunnel, past a bronze statue that vaguely resembled either a man on horseback, or possibly three women dancing.
“Is she heading towards the river?” Will asked, and Egg shushed him. The soft susurrus of the Lesser Stark, one of the many small tributaries of the greater Stark, could be heard below the roads that had been built above it. Egg listened closely for the telltale sound of echoing footsteps, trying to sort them out from the random, quiet cacophony that was the sound of city life. He heard, some distance away, a sharp, precise rapping sound.
“That way,” Egg muttered, taking them deeper into the Arcadium. He had her now, he was sure. The sound of her shoes, the rustling of her skirts, the tapping of that weird clicking noise the knockers made. He could even see her shadow flickering in the messy whorl of blue light from the phlogiston lamps. Egg slipped his hand inside his coat and took a hold of his knife.
It wasn’t that he liked killing people, women especially. It’s that it was good money, and from an early age, Egg had realized he was good at not feeling bad about things. And since a man has to earn a living, he needs to take advantage of the assets he has available.
“Here, what’s this?” Will said, as the two men rounded the corner. Will knelt down and drew a skirt out from a puddle of petticoats. “She’s walking around in her bloomers?”
Egg’s eyes narrowed and he looked around. They were in a fairly large Close, with side-streets leading off in four more directions. Two of them were pitch dark, their lanterns burned out or broken by vandals.
“She’s left her shoes, too,” Will snickered. “Maybe this won’t be such a bad time after all.”
“Shut up,” Egg snapped. A wave of knocking swept through the close, echoing off the walls, compounding on itself until it began to sound like thunder. Will swung around wildly, imagining that the source was nearby. Egg, by coincidence, looked up at the hanging lamp that cast blue light into the Close. Its metal frame was rattling alarmingly fast; the key that controlled the phlogiston flow was shaking in its socket as the knocking grew louder-and then, abruptly, the key fell out.
Phlogiston poured into the lamp, ignited by the filament, and exploded in a burst of blinding, blue-white light. When their vision cleared, the two men found the close almost impenetrably dark. The knocking continued, softer now, and proceeded down the alley directly ahead of them.
“Shit,” Will muttered. “Did she do that? I didn’t know they could do that.”
“Shut up and follow-wait…” There was a second clicking now, from the other alley. It didn’t sound quite the same…was it an echo? “Wait. We’ll split up. I’ll go down this one, you take that one. She can’t be far, not if she’s running without shoes on. She’ll cut her feet on something soon enough, and we can just follow the blood, then.”
“Yeah,” Will said. “All right.” He muttered something under his breath and took a few steps into the dark, making him practically invisible to Egg.
Egg set his hand along one of the stone walls and slowly made his way down the alley. He could see, at some remove, another lantern, its light a faint pinprick in the dark. A trick of the shadow and the distance made it seem to throb. “All right, miss. We know you know about us. Come along then. We don’t want to do nothing to you, you know? We’re just sent to talk. You’re going to hurt yourself, stumbling around in the dark like this.” Inwardly, he thought, Shit. He knew they’d catch her eventually-she’d stumble into a dead-end, or something. But the Arcadium was huge, and it could easily take all night.
“Ow, fuck!” Will’s voice echoed off the walls.
“What? What is it?” Egg shouted.
Will growled wordlessly, then responded. “She’s. Ow, she fucking stabbed me. She has a knife or something. She’s here.”
“You have her?” Egg turned around and ran back towards the entrance to the alley, heedless of the pitch darkness.
“No, idiot. Fuck. Fucking-if I had her, wouldn’t I say I had her? She’s near here-”
“What-” Egg began, when his ankles struck something hard. He tumbled forward, knife skittering from his hand, cracking his elbows against the stone. He slid a few paces, not quite fast enough to crack his head open on the wall opposite. “Shit! What was…” Footsteps. Bare feet slapped on the stone, just for an instant, back the way he’d come. They were obscured almost at once by another wave of sourceless knocking. “Bitch. Crafty little bitch. Will, are you all right?”
“Yeah.” Will’s voice was close enough to startle Egg. He squinted, and could just make out the other man’s shape in the dark. “She got me good, though, right in the arm. She’s got a knife-”
“Never mind,” Egg got to his feet. “Never mind that, we know where she is. Just follow me, all right?”
“Right,” Will put his hand on Egg’s shoulder as they started down the alley again.