The Translated Man and Other Stories - Chris Braak [0]
Chris Braak
9781257146369
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
One: Beneath the City
Two: Beckett’s Home
Three: The Crime
Four: The Sharpsies
Five: Alan Charterhouse
Six: Herman Zindel’s Home
Seven: the Excelsior
Eight: James Crowell in the Arcadium
Nine: The City of Brass, Skinner
Ten: The Theater
Eleven: The Assassin
Twelve: The House on Corimander Street
Thirteen: Valentine Returns
Fourteen: The Dangers of Heresy
Fifteen: The Dangers of Veneine
Sixteen: The House on Corimander Street
Seventeen: Valentine’s Story
Eighteen: The Psychestorm
Nineteen: The Hospital
Twenty: Charterhouse’s Dilemma
Twenty-One: Mudside
Twenty-Two: The Coachman’s Son
Twenty-Three: Questions. Answers.
Twenty-four: The Road to Mount Hood
Twenty-five: Gotheray Castle
Twenty-Six: A Visitor
Twenty-Seven: The Disaster at Vlytze Square
Twenty-Eight: The Pilot, the Mastermind
Twenty-Nine: The Translated Man
Thirty: Down the Mountain
Thirty-One: A Conclusion
One: Beneath the City
In the labyrinth called the Arcadium, the low roads and covered alleys beneath the city’s merchant district, Elijah Beckett, Detective-Inspector of the Coroners’ Division of the Imperial Guard, thumbed the hammer back on his massive revolver, and crouched beneath one of the broken phlogiston lanterns. It leaked its spent, silvery-gray fuel onto his leather hat, splattering down his heavy wool coat and forming a little puddle by his feet, but at least it didn’t light him up. Most of the regularly-spaced lamps had been broken, and probably long ago. The remaining lamps provided only a bare, dull, eerie blue glow, turning the dark spaces into a nest of suggestive shadows. The occasional sunbeam that broke through the city’s chilly, cloudy, smoky sky rarely broke through the mountain of architecture, and the last dregs of weak sunlight were eaten up well before they made it down to where Beckett now stood.
The closest working lamp was about twenty feet away, and it pulsed a deep, eldritch blue. Beckett tugged his hat down to blot the glare out of his eyes, and tried to spot the Reanimate, the hideous undead chimera that he knew was shambling in the dark beyond the light. He hefted his revolver and waited. Waiting was the only part of his job that got easier as he got older: as the frigid ache of his sickness vied with the warm lassitude of his last veneine injection, he found that stillness had become his natural state of being.
Something big lurched in the darkness at the end of the alley, just beyond the light, causing a kaleidoscopic swirl of black shapes. The shadows made it impossible to track the thing’s movement. Beckett briefly debated finding a new position. If the Reanimate knew where he was, it would try to move around behind him. On the other hand, if it didn’t know where he was, moving might alert it to his presence. Beckett squashed the jittery instinct that told him to move. Patience had gotten him this far, patience would get him the rest of the way.
There was a faint rapping on the sooty stone wall by his ear. This was Skinner, Beckett’s assigned Knocker. She’d been keeping track of the Reanimate and its master, using her uncanny ability to hear sounds from hundreds of yards away, and to project the tapping sound that was a Knocker’s signature. Skinner’s intricate double-rhythmic code jittered on the wall. Thirty-five feet, Beckett translated mentally. It doesn’t know I’m here yet. Keep waiting.
The Reanimate’s lurching footsteps grew louder. Beckett strained his eyes against the unyielding dark, and could make out a vague adumbration, a hazy, hideous silhouette slowly shuffling into the lamp light. The shape moved steadily, painfully, its mismatched limbs poorly-knit together, and Beckett could make out more and more as the blue glow from the lamp cast itself on the Reanimate’s form. It was a big hulking thing, even hunched over. The Reanimate kept its nose near the ground, because smell and hearing were the only senses that didn’t rot away after its undeath, and now the thing