“Course, course,” Mrs. Crewell said, softly. “Oh! Someone’s left a letter for you. Fancy paper, looks like. Have you got a gentlemen, Miss Skinner?”
“No,” Skinner said, firmly. It was probably a bill from the Committee, asking for her salary back.
“Shall I read it for you?”
“No. Not…I’d just like to sit down for a minute, Mrs. Crewell.”
“Oh dearie, of course,” the housekeeper replied. “You go on up to your room, I’ll send Roger in to you in a few minutes.” Roger was one of Mrs. Crewell’s innumerable grandchildren. He was only ten, and just learning how to read, so Mrs. Crewell employed him as Skinner’s reader. The arrangement actually worked out fairly well; while ten-year-olds are not notable for their ability to keep secrets, Roger was just young and incurious enough that he hardly understood a word of the messages that he relayed to the knocker.
Not that it matters, Skinner thought. She was unlikely to receive any missives from the Coroners any time soon. “Yes, all right,” she told the housekeeper, and, shucking her coat and gloves, made her way to her room.
She sat in her small chair, and held her cane between her hands, wondering what she should do. She had little in the way of personal items or clothes, so packing them up should be no great trial. Except that she had nowhere to take them, nothing to do with them. If she went down to Red Lanes, maybe, or into Riverside. The indige had different ideas about their women, one that the Empire tended to tolerate. Maybe they’d let her rent a room there? Six crowns would buy her a little more than a month, if she set something aside for food. That would take her to the end of Second Winter, at least. She’d never afford movers, though, or a coach, so she could bring only what she could carry. A few dresses, and she’d have to be diligent about laundering them herself. The guitar was light, but would not hold up well in the freezing cold air, even in the short time it took to get across the city. She’d have to wrap it up in her smallclothes. And then what? Once she got there, once she was living in Riverside, then what?
Don’t think about that. You can’t do anything about that. Solve the problems that are in front of you first. Skinner noted, with a wry grin, that her inner voice had begun to sound an awful lot like Elijah Beckett.
“Mum?” Roger rapped on her door. “Mum, I’ve got your letter, mum.”
“Come in, Roger,” Skinner told him, and suddenly realized that her room was freezing. She’d left the heat on low when she went out. “Go ahead and put on a light, and turn the heat up a little, would you darling?” She heard the faint screech of the lamp-switch, and felt the warmth from the heater. “Good lad.”
“Gram says I’m to read this. All right?”
“Yes, please.”
“Uhm.” The sound of paper rustling, as the boy opened it. “Oh! There’s a fancy crest on it, looks like. I don’t know what it’s supposed to be…”
“It’s all right, Roger, just read the letter.”
“Uhm. To. Miss Elizabeth Skinner. It has come to my at…attent…”
“Attention.”
“Attention. That you and I share si-mi-lar in-terest. Interests. I wooled-”
“Would.”
“Would. Be pleased if you joined me at the Royal the-a-ter. Oh! At the theater. I shall send a coach for you. At seven. Yours…” The boy stopped, and Skinner heard his breath catch. “Oh. Emilia Vie-Gorgon.” Even a ten year old knew the Vie-Gorgon name. The Vie-Gorgons were one of the most famous of the Esteemed Families of Trowth; their legendary feud with the Gorgon-Vies was one of the defining elements not just of politics, but of the Architecture War, of culture and entertainment, of virtually every aspect of the Empire. The Vie-Gorgon family was second from the Imperial Throne, and Emilia Vie-Gorgon’s brother was next in line to be Emperor. An invitation from her-an invitation to someone like Skinner-was like…well, it wasn’t like anything. Nothing like this had ever happened before. The Families didn’t associate with the commoners unless they had to, and even then it was only appropriate for the least relevant members-fourth or fifth sons, like Valentine, or else secondary or tertiary cousins. Emilia Vie-Gorgon…if Trowth had a princess, Emilia Vie-Gorgon would be it.
“It don’t say,” said Roger, “if you want to accept or not. Shouldn’t it say that?”
Emilia Vie-Gorgon probably didn’t consider that someone might want to turn her down. “I wouldn’t worry about it, Roger. Tell me, do you know what’s on the playbill at the Royal tonight?”
Three
Beckett sat at his desk and stared. It was piled high with papers-with the reports that he’d been demanding. Arrest reports, biographies, kirliotypes. Pictures of crime scenes, spattered with blood, pulsing with strange auras. Stacks of clippings from the broadsheets, relating tales that ranged from the mundane (“Abundance of Rats in Red Lane Gutters”) to the unpleasant (“Third Severed Hand Found in Mudside”) to the purely outlandish (“Gendarmes Replaced With Ectoplasmic Dopplegangers: Who Can We Trust?”). There were reports of looted crypts, hospitals that had been robbed, men that had been found bleeding dreams into the streets, or wandering about with scaly arms grafted to their bodies. There were lists of men in custody, trolljrmen who’d unwisely practiced their chimerstry away from the secrecy of their hospitals, of indige geometers who’d been brought in for engaging in heretically hyper-spatial mathematics, human men rounded up from the duetti clubs where they’d been purposefully over-dosing on veneine…
Beckett scratched at the itch by his eye, and leaned back in his chair. His forearm throbbed a little from where he’d injected himself, but mostly the veneine left him feeling detached, floating. His left eye, despite its blindness, detected no small number of thin, writhing black shapes that wriggled across the walls of his office, but Beckett did not find himself concerned. Nor did he find himself concerned by the damp stains on his walls, or the shallow puddle of water by his feet. The warmth and peace of the veneine high would last only a little longer, and the old coroner was determined to enjoy it wall it lasted.
Soon enough, the cold and anxiety began to creep back in. Distant aches in his knees and back began to sharpen, the numbness in his face and fingers demanded more of his attention. The water dried up, though the wriggling black eels remained, making it difficult to concentrate on his papers. The Committee on Moral Responsibility had forced him to fire Karine, his indige secretary. The new man they’d found-a timid, shell-shocked young man who’d worked primarily with the quartermasters during the war-was purely incapable of distinguishing useful information from dross, so Beckett found himself obliged to wade through the mess himself.
The papers seemed unlikely to yield up their secrets any time soon. In the last few months, the sheer amount of information to come across Beckett’s desk had increased exponentially. Heretical science was spreading through the city like a disease, cropping up left and right, everywhere from dingy public houses in the Arcadium to the fancy homes of New Bank. There was no clear point of origin, no source, no connection between any of the heretics. It was all just a tangled, unnavigable mess of half-formed leads, each one turning a half a dozen corners before it dead-ended in a corpse somewhere.
This had been the story of Beckett’s life for years. Find evidence of a heresy, find the heretic, kill them. As often as not, their own foolishness did the job for him. But it never stopped. No matter how many lunatic scientists Beckett ended, there was always one more. And now, now every time he put a stop to an ectoplasmatist or a necrologist somewhere, a half a dozen more seemed to spring up in the wake. Forty years of work in the coroners, and every day the problem just got worse, and worse, and worse.
A hysterical frustration rattled around in Beckett’s mind, as he rubbed his hands over his face. The veneine, he was sure, was shaking him loose. It was harder and harder for him to maintain that cold detachment, that sense of duty that let him just tackle one job at a time, and not think about the rest, not think about the implications, not think about the never-ending chain of more death and more misery that waited for him every day, and would wait every day until he finally gave up. He slapped at a report at random and picked it up.