And then it was gone. All gone, the vision disappearing with the same sudden completeness as ectoplasm gone up in flame. The hands on his arms were Harry’s hands-ordinary, rough coachman’s hands. The face made of curved teeth was only Harry’s face, his ordinary, ugly old face.
The ringing began to fade from Beckett’s ears. “-eckett!” Harry was shouting. “Mr. Beckett! Are you all right?” Gorud had retreated to a corner of the coach, watching, his eyes wide.
Two dark green shoots sprung from Harry’s nostrils, tendrils with sharp thorns, springing from the soft places of his body, curling back to scratch at his own eyes.
“What…” Beckett asked, his voice hardly above a whisper. “Garrett? Garrett, your dead,” the old man declared, as the twin green vines blossomed into blood-red flowers.
“It’s me, sir,” Sergeant Garret said, more thorny vines pouring from his mouth, “it’s me, it’s Harry, sir. Can you hear me? Are you all right? Do you know me sir?”
No, Beckett told himself. It’s Harry, it’s just Harry. Garret died. They were still inside the coach. Beckett was wedged against the seat; his ribs were still sore. “What happened? What was that?”
“There’s something up ahead of us, some kind of explosion,” Harry told him, the vines gone, his face his own again. “Shook the whole place up. I came to see if you was all right, and then…”
“You fell,” Gorud picked up. “When the shock came. Your eye did this,” he rolled his eyes up in his head, so that only the whites were visible. “And then you coughed and choked, and then Mr. Harry came in to help.”
Beckett coughed wetly, wiped his mouth, and pulled himself upright. “Explosion?”
“Something up ahead, sir.”
Beckett scrambled from the coach, a sinking feeling in his stomach. He barely noticed the bitter cold outside, as it struck out at his already-senseless extremities. His good eye raced over the narrow, high-peaked and gabled Ennering-Crabtree buildings; houses, offices and shops that had been converted from old abattoirs. People were timidly peeking out from their doors and windows, a few braver souls actually taking to the streets, consternation on their tongues.
At the end of Augre Street was the smoking husk of a building, a great slaughterhouse that had been repurposed, as the city expanded, into some other professional edifice. Its pointed roofs, now crooked and tumbled, would have looked out of place even if they’d remained intact. Smoke poured from its windows, and a hysterical gibbering rose from the inside.
Beckett limped down the hill, Harry and Gorud at his heels. He drew his revolver, swiveling his head from side-to-side, struggling to reconstruct what had happened. A man in a blue coat stumbled from the building; he was covered in soot, and his eyes were wild and white-rimmed.
“…the overwhelming way of winter’s seven towers,” the man was screaming. A dark, thick fluid dribbled from his mouth and nose. “I saw the red gold walls and the ivory-towered teeth.” He charged at Beckett, grabbed his wrists, tried to bear him to the ground. “There are men in the dark,” he said, weeping that same black fluid from his eyes. “There are stone sounds..”
“Get off!” Beckett shouted, twisted his body, trying to let the man’s momentum throw him away. Harry managed to get hold of him and pull him off the coroner, but the strange man continued to lash and struggle and wail, blubbering nonsense as the foul ooze began to poor from his eyes and mouth and nose.
Beckett struck the man across the face with the butt of his revolver, and the stranger went limp. It seemed merciful; the twisted rictus on the man’s face relaxed away.
“Tommy,” said a soft voice nearby. Beckett turned to see a young man, very pale, staring at the smoking building with a strange absorption. His left sleeve was empty, and pinned up to the shoulder.
“Tommy?” Beckett asked him. “Is that his name? What happened here?”
“It’s Tommy, innit?” The young pale man said. “They dropped them bombs on us.”
Beckett clutched at his revolver, ready to knock this man senseless as well. “Tommy who?”
“Vinegar Tom,” the man said, still not looking at the coroner. “The Ettercap.”
The Ettercap. The Ettercap used oneiric munitions-bombs that had a psychic component as well as an explosive. The damage caused by concussion and shrapnel was trivial compared to the disorder, chaos, and damage that could be caused by turning the survivors of an attack into raving madmen. The air around the bombed-out former slaughterhouse was growing thick and syrupy. Weird colors and puissance began to flicker in the smoky windows. Beckett could smell saltwater. Dream poison, he thought. More mad gibbering rattled around inside the building.
“Look,” he said to the young man. “Hey, boy, listen.” He seized the man’s arm and forcibly turned him. “Look at me. I need you to go and get the local gendarmes, all right? Go to the gendarmerie, bring me back some men…”
“The gendarmerie?” The young man said, his eyes dreamy, unfocused. “That is the gendarmerie.”
Four
Skinner heard the explosion fifteen seconds before it happened. The sound began as a peculiar ringing over her guitar strings, an echo overlaid across the tune she’d been playing. Her hands paused at once, and the ringing remained, a high-pitched whine, followed by a strange, reverse echo-a rumbling that grew exponentially louder as it led up to the event itself, and then stopped.
Light from the munition reverberated off of the obscured architecture of the city and filtered past her silver eye-plate to tease her peculiar senses. It was pale white, with a faint rainbow hue at its edges; all of this was clearly visible in her mind’s eye, though no product of her own imagination. She could tell its distance, its location-just inside Red Lanes, she knew-and she recognized it as an oneiric weapon immediately. The dream-precipitates used in such charges were largely inconsiderate of local laws regarding space and time, and their effects could be felt by sensitives in a way out of joint with ordinary reckoning.
When Skinner had joined the Coroners, her first assignment had been outside the city-to a town near the seaside called Seagirt. It had been a small place, a population less than a thousand. A man, a former scientist at the Royal Academy of Science and a near-cousin of the Rowan-Czarneckis, had retired to Seagirt after certain improprieties in his research had come to light. His connections and the Estimation of the Crown had kept him from further investigation, and probably execution, but, perhaps not surprisingly, the threat of the Coroners had not been enough to keep him from more experiments. It hardly ever was.
The man had attempted to build an oneiric reactor, a machine that could seize on the repressed psychosexual energy of sidereal consciousness and turn it directly into power. He had failed to take any reasonable precautions, and in a real way, this had not been his fault: because oneiristry was a Forbidden Science, there was little information as to exactly what reasonable precautions would be. The results of Eiger Feathersmith’s experiments on oneiristry, a hundred years prior, had been suppressed by the Church Royal, so this Rowan-Czarnecki scientist could not have known what would happen when his reactor went critical.
In instances of catastrophic oneiric events, the Coroners’ mission is simple. Locate damaged minds, and kill them. A man exposed to an excess of oneiric radiation would suffer dream poisoning; he would no longer be lucid, his mind would be unrecoverable, and his condition could become contagious. By the time the coroners had reached Seagirt, the entire population was infected-a whole city of raving madmen, the conscious-subconscious membrane dissolved by corrosive dream radiation-they tore at their flesh, struck out at each other, murdered, raped, burned, engaged in every foul and heinous desire that they had secretly feared to indulge.