“We stand in harmony with. We stand in harmony with. We stand in harmony with.”
From the bullet wounds in his chest, black ichor bled in thick, gummy rivulets down his suit.
Forty
It was some days after the incident before Skinner was finally able to meet the Emperor’s would-be assassin. He was being held under arrest at a temporary facility in New Bank, a townhouse owned by the Vie-Gorgon family. Skinner was admitted, dirty, disheveled, and haggard as she was-having been wearing the same clothes since her untimely departure from the Akori household-with a minimal amount of fuss. Someone had indicated to the men on duty that she might be expected. She strode in, her telerhythmia furiously rapping on every available surface. It ruffled papers into the air, nudged chairs out of position, and swung a portrait of Farrier Vie-Gorgon so forcefully on its nail that the painting fell from the wall and crashed to the floor with a resounding thunk.
“You,” Skinner said, as she entered.
“Hello!” The man replied.
Skinner walked up to him and slapped him across the face. When he did not immediately respond, she began hitting him in the chest and stomach. She caught him a good blow to the solar plexus, and he doubled over and began coughing. “You asshole. You irresponsible miserable stupid asshole.”
“Here, I thought-”
She punched him, hard, right in the face. Not quite hard enough to smash his nose completely, but enough to draw blood, and enough to knock him back into the small sofa in which he had been lounging. “You’ve been missing for months. For fucking months, I thought you were dead, you fucking bastard!”
“Yes, but-”
“For months, you let everyone think that you’re dead, and then what? What’s the first thing that you decide to do? How do you announce your presence to the rest of us peons? Is it with a letter? A note? No! You try and kill the bastard Emperor.” Her fury spent, Skinner sat down with a huff in the chair opposite. “You are lucky I lost my sword, Valentine, or I would stab you in your neck.”
“I think you broke my nose,” Valentine said. She couldn’t see that his face was still yellowed with old bruises from the beating he’d already taken during his apprehension.
“Good.” Skinner crossed her arms and effected a scowl; the silver plate across her eyes spoiled the effect somewhat, as it tended to cause all of her expressions to blend into “serious but enigmatic.” After a moment, she asked, “How did you know, by the way? That he was a reanimate?”
“Look…I’m sorry about all of that.” Valentine leaned back against the couch and held his nose. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you, but my plan was kind of dangerous, you know? I didn’t want you to be implicated, because I didn’t think that both of us should go to jail, and then I couldn’t find you…ow, Skinner, my nose really hurts.”
“Good,” Skinner asserted. “What plan?”
“Yes,” rasped a new voice from the door way. “What plan?”
Elijah Beckett looked somewhat the worse for wear. He was wearing his gray suit, as usual, but had put on his heavy gray overcoat to stave off a chill. His hair was thin, and his good eye had a pronounced dark circle beneath it. The skin that was left visible was paper-thin and pale, before it dissolved almost entirely into vivid gore. The whole right side of his face had been consumed by the fades, down nearly into the bones, exposing spongy red marrow in his cheeks and jaw. His speech was slurred faintly; his lips seemed to have trouble forming words. “What plan?” He asked again.
“Beckett…” Valentine whispered, his voice tinged with awe. He managed to collect himself. “It was nothing to do with…with the thing. That I did. It was for Skinner, I was trying to do her a favor-”
“Then how did you know about the Emperor?”
“I…” Valentine paused. He wiped the blood from his nose, sat up straight in the chair. “I just. I knew.”
Skinner wondered about that. About Valentine, watching his family’s business seized, his mother and father and brothers and sisters driven into exile. Had he worried about her, too? Stuck without a job, without prospects, shoved aside despite all her hard work by an ungrateful emperor? Had he seen what William II had made of Trowth? Had Valentine known at all?
“You knew,” Beckett repeated. He sounded as though he had barely any strength left at all. “You knew. Because you went back to the abbey, and looked in the book. You saw Stitch’s name, you saw that he’d been to the Black Library. Realized he must have been responsible for the heretical pamphlets we’d found. Put it all together. Somehow.”
“Somehow,” said Valentine, after a long, pregnant moment. “Yeah.”
“So, your plan didn’t really have anything to do with the Emperor?” Skinner asked. “What were you doing?”
“It didn’t at first,” Valentine replied, his voice unaccountably cold. It warmed as he spoke, though, almost to the point that he sounded like the old familiar Valentine. “At first I was just doing Skinner a favor, like I said. It was dangerous, but I just realized, I knew where we kept some of the old presses. There were a couple in an old printer’s shop in the Arcadium that no one had used for a few years. So, I thought, ‘Well, Skinner just needs money from her play, right? And nothing’s more popular to read than something you’re not supposed to.’ So…I…well, I printed up a bunch of copies of Theocles and started selling them.”
“You sold my play?”
“Well, eventually I started paying people to sell it. You…ah, you made a lot of money, Skinner. Anyway, the Committee on Moral Responsibility was getting dangerously close, so I had to clear out. It was then…that was when I got the idea about the log book. I’d been kind of preoccupied, you know?”
“Good enough for me.” The old man slumped in a chair. “You’ll be cleared today. You’d have been out yesterday, really, except that there’s been some…ah…administrative confusion.”
“Because of the new Emperor?” Skinner asked. Emilio Vie-Gorgon, Valentine’s cousin and Emilia’s brother, would certainly be crowned. Eventually. Some question remained as to what precise timeline that auspicious event would proceed along.
“No,” Beckett replied. “All of the ministries of Trowth function fairly well, emperor or no. They run on a kind of inertia. Most of the trouble comes when he tries to interfere. No, the problem is with Stitch gone, no one’s sure who to deliver the reports to. The Ennering kid can’t read them, and I don’t want them.”
“What…what was really going on here, Beckett?” Valentine asked.
“I don’t know for sure. But. I think that Stitch has been…’sword and fuck, I think it’s been responsible for everything. The pamphlets, definitely. The attacks…the attack on the Emperor. It replaced him with a reanimate. It’s been trying to get control of the Empire for two hundred years, at least. “
“I think,” Skinner added, “that Emilia was involved, as well. I’m sure that Stitch intended for me to right this play-though, frankly, whether Stitch was using Emilia, or she was using Stitch, I don’t know.”
With a groan and a crackle of his joints, Beckett managed to hoist himself back out of his chair. He stood and hesitated for a moment. “I don’t…I don’t know what to do anymore. They want me to retire.”
Skinner was on her feet immediately. She took a step towards him, ready to…she didn’t know what. Talk him out of it? Elijah Beckett was the bedrock of the Coroners, was in some way the foundation of her understanding of the coroners-what it meant to put duty above all things.
And yet, for Word’s sake, he was old. He’d been giving of himself, sacrificing life and comfort and basic human contact in the name of the Empire since before Skinner was born. If there was any man in the world who deserved a rest, surely it was him.