Elijah Beckett, Detective-Inspector of the Royal Coroners, was having trouble understanding very much of anything that was happening anymore. He heard gears, spinning so fast that he was sure they must soon fly apart. And he saw Mr. Stitch, the grotesque, undead giant, standing as devoid of expression as a statue. But he somehow saw Mr. Stitch outside of time now-Mr. Stitch at once here, the architect of the murder and mayhem that had dogged the city for a year, and Mr. Stitch in the past. The Mr. Stitch that had founded the Coroners, the one that had engineered the Dragon Isles expedition, why? At this weird remove, divorced from his own present senses, the long arc of Stitch’s planning became, if not obvious, more clear.
If a man needs an army to fight heresy, he starts by finding men who have been hurt by it. And if he cannot find men who have been hurt by heretic science, he makes them. A simple solution, almost elegant, if morally repugnant. A kind of point A to point C solution only possible by a mind essentially unencumbered with pity or concern.
Many things still didn’t quite make sense, and Beckett wasn’t sure if they ever would, wasn’t sure if the plan he was looking at was simply too big, too long, too intricate to reveal itself to him. Why? Why all of this? He realized a moment later that he’d asked it aloud.
Stitch turned to him, dead muscles creaking, brass eyes fixed. “I must. Defend. The Empire.”
“From what?” Beckett held up his gun. “From what? You did this! You were the one…the one spreading heresy. The one that told Anonymous John where to get the oneiric weapons, the one that…you’re defending Trowth from yourself?”
“No.” Stitch replied, simply. The anguish that sounded in his throat seemed more of an affectation, a byproduct of his dead lungs, than moved by real human concern. “There is. Something. Worse.” The hulking reanimate gestured out at the assembled throng, distant voices like the waves of the ocean, all unaware of the sinister mind that looked on them. “They must. Be. Ruled.”
Beckett staggered back against the wall and sank down to the floor; his strength ebbing from his body. He wanted to spit his denial in Stitch’s teeth but he was afraid that maybe it was true. He remembered Anonymous John, telling him about the Clock that secretly governed the soul of Trowth. He thought about the byzantine bickering, the intricate waste of confusion and bureaucracy that mired him down. About the Emperor, who for all the honor of his office was little more than a clown in fancy dress, preoccupied with his mistresses, squeezing every cent, every iota of goodwill, every dram of happiness from the city. He had become a tyrant; a man that confused the expression of his power with his own ego.
The Feathersmith pistol in Beckett’s hands was ice cold. He wondered if he were really feeling it at all, because the pain of that cold stabbed right through the numb tips of his fingers. He imagined that the gun was not cold at all, but that it had become cold to his mind, which insisted on its coldness no matter how he held it. He wondered if…the men he’d hurt…all this time, and it was never for the city, for the Empire, only some microscopic part of Stitch’s catastrophic plan. He saw the girl, Agnes Cooper, saying her prayers and weeping because of the harm her mind had suffered. Alan Charterhouse, banished from his own home because of Beckett’s swerving devotion to his duty. Dozens of heretic scientists gunned down, and for what?
All this misery, for nothing. Lives lost and wasted, it was all obscene. It was too much, Beckett knew. Every second the fades ate away at him from the outside, and every second the drugs burned him up from the inside, a black acid on his soul. And now this.
“What about me?” He whispered staring at the barrel of his gun.
“You,” said Mr. Stitch. “Are. No longer. Necessary.”
Something lurched in him, and he saw himself at a distance, saw himself taking other paths into the gallery, taking a wrong turn here, hesitating a fraction of a second there. He saw himself on the gallery across the way, overlooking the gathered crowd. He saw the Emperor beginning his Invocation, saw a filthy beggar drawing his guns, saw the Lobstermen gunning him down before he had a chance to fire.
Beckett’s mind was trying to flee, into the past, into the future, into alternate possibilities; anything to escape this one inevitable moment. But there was nowhere else. Beckett wanted to weep, but he knew he didn’t have that in him anymore. He cocked his gun instead.
The filthy beggar man stood alone in a small circle in the square. The pressure of the crowd was not quite sufficient to overcome the olfactory counter-pressure of his stench, and this gave him some elbow room. He grinned green scraver-teeth and gabbled in what could only have been the incomprehensible gibberish of the mad or senile. He ignored the finer-dressed men and women who, through some peculiar effect of the dynamics of crowds, managed to gradually shift as far from him as possible, creating a spectrum or stratification of the people gathered for the Invocation.
The Emperor appeared on the balcony, dressed in a black suit, resplendent with medals commemorating wars he’d never fought in and honors he was only vaguely aware of. He wore his thick, black-tinted glasses, which was somewhat gauche, but hardly without precedent. He seemed to have paradoxically gained weight since his harrowing experience on the train, and seemed a little sallow, but besides that, hardly the worse for wear. He raised his arms, somewhat stiffly, and called out to the gathered mass.
“Hail, men of Trowth! We stand in harmony with the Word!”
As the speech began, the filthy man reached beneath his ragged costume and began to draw two beautiful, silver-plated revolvers. The Lobstermen saw him at once, but in the precise moment before they fired, another gunshot rang out from a gallery above the square.
The Lobstermen all turned to face it, moved to protect the Emperor, to engage the assailant, confusion setting in as they drew a bead on their new target, only to hear more gunshots, dozens of strange echoes. A man in ragged shirt-tails, with a morbid visage, a face so ravaged by disease that it looked like a skull-a man with a black iron revolver firing wildly into the crowd. He appeared in a half a dozen places simultaneously, unrestricted by the laws of physics.
The Royal Guard fired back instantly, as they attempted to ascertain the nature of this new threat. Their bullets struck the strange phantoms, which dissolved into jagged, fractured lines of causality.
And in this moment of distraction the beggar aimed his revolvers and fired both of them, round after round into William II Gorgon-Vie’s chest.
Gunshots rippled across the square, the grim-visaged man appeared and disappeared, each causal doppelganger finally being borne down beneath the Lobstermen’s gunfire.
The man who smelled like sewage was tackled hard by the men around him. He was beaten soundly, but not killed. They held him tight, instead, intending that he should be taken into custody.
After some moments of pandemonium, during which the milling crowd turned to near-deadly panic in its attempt to escape the confines of the square, the gunfire ceased. The strange man’s spectres had all disappeared, the mad beggar was restrained, the Lobstermen cautiously ceased their fusillade. The crowd had almost completely evacuated the Royal Square.
When the Lobstermen attained the balcony where the first shot had been fired, they found Elijah Beckett comatose and half dead, and Mr. Stitch. The huge reanimate had been shot in the head five times. The miracle difference engine that was its conscious mind was now a fine scattered sand of impossibly tiny gears. Its body stood, still vital and held in place by the heretical chemistry that had created it. Its brass eyes betrayed no evidence of the changed condition.
The men held the Emperor’s real assassin to the ground and discovered that his beard was false, and had only been glued on. The looked up towards the Emperor who, despite having eight holes in his chest, was still standing. He cocked his head to the right, again and again. Opened his mouth to speak the same words over and over: