The Translated Man and Other Stories - Chris Braak [13]
The young man shook his head. “Right. So, no gun, let’s say he couldn’t reach the poker. I guess, I guess he’d try and fight them off with his hands, right?” There was a long pause. “But…but if he did that, how come there’s no marks on them? There’d have to be bruises on his wrists at least, where the sharpsie held him down, marks from his fingernails. Bite marks, probably, too.”
Beckett stood. “Not sharpsies.” A twinge of resentment slithered around in his voice. It’s not like I wouldn’t have figured it out. “My guess is that these people were dead before their bodies were…mutilated.”
“And someone wants us to think it was the sharpsies?” Skinner asked. “Why?”
“I don’t know.” Beckett added that question to the list of Several Other Things He Didn’t Know, but Would Really Like To: namely, who killed Herman Zindel and his family? Why did they do it? How did they do it? How did they get into and out of the house without breaking a lock or a window? And, perhaps most pertinently, why had the coroners been called in to investigate?
Questions needed answers, answers needed information. The three coroners began a thorough search of the house. They found no unusual footprints, broken windows, broken locks, dirt that happened to only come from one part of town, or matchbooks with a tavern’s name stamped on them that had been conveniently dropped by the murderer.
In fact, while Beckett and Valentine gingerly made their way throughout the house, searching through cabinets, checking underneath tables and desks and beds, they found nothing at all of note. Skinner was a different story. While Beckett and Valentine examined, Skinner simply followed them from room to room, her telerhythmia bouncing off the walls with a consistent knock-knock-knock, and listening closely to the sound, trying to parse out whatever meaning was hidden in those hollow raps that all sounded the same to Beckett.
“Here,” Skinner finally said, at the end of an unusually short hall.
Valentine glanced at her. “You’re sure?”
Skinner nodded.
“Try . . . grab the candlestick there,” Beckett told the young man. Valentine did, and nothing happened. “Try pushing against the wall.” Again, nothing. “Hm. Wait. There. Is that a bust of Harcourt Wolfram?” On a small table at the end of the short hall was a small, marble bust of the famous scientist. Valentine attempted to pick the bust up, and found it attached to a small cable. There was a clicking sound in the walls, and the end of the hall became a door, and suddenly swung open.
“Paydirt,” Valentine said, grinning.
In a city like Trowth, whose heart was a maze of back alleys and labyrinthine passages, a city where a man could be arrested and executed for practicing the wrong kinds of science, where a hundred Ministries and royal Families plied their Byzantine politics at all hours, hidden rooms and compartments like the one in Herman Zindel’s house were actually very common. Knockers, while they were useful for relaying information around the city, and keeping track of enemies in the dark, found that the primary need for their employment was locating secret doors.
The tiny room behind the door yielded a wealth of information, though Beckett, for his life, could not have said whether or not it was useful information.
“What is all this?” Beckett asked. The small, cramped room was jammed with large slate chalkboards, and the ground was littered with crumbled sheets of paper. Everything was covered with numbers, diagrams, formulae, all in the same sloppy handwriting.
Valentine pursed his lips and let out a low whistle. “Not like any math that I’ve ever seen.” This was no idle statement of fact; Valentine Vie-Gorgon had the best education money could buy.
Beckett agreed. “I think we know why they called us. This has to be Aetheric Geometry.”
Four: The Sharpsies
From a distance, a sharpsie—whose scientific name was “omphaloskepsis,” and whose name in their own language was something utterly unutterable—looked much like a human being. They were the same height, though