The Translated Man and Other Stories - Chris Braak [26]
On the surface, the simplest solution was a sharpsie break-in, which is precisely what made Beckett distrust it. If Stitch hadn’t been there, hadn’t called Beckett in right away, then there wouldn’t have been a search of the home. No one would have brought in a psychometrist, no one would have found Zindel’s equations, or the recording cylinders. The investigation would have just stopped, and the gendarmes would have headed out to kill sharpsies.
If you were trying to throw someone off the trail, the sharpsies made a perfect target. That gendarme captain wouldn’t have worried about unlocked doors, about lack of struggle. He’d find the answer he liked, and stop looking. Beckett liked sharpsies as an answer, because they were easy. But he couldn’t stop looking. Thirty years in service, trading away the better parts of himself as he steeped in the horror that human beings were capable of, and it seemed like the obdurate refusal to stop searching was the only thing that Beckett had left.
Someone had killed Herman Zindel, and Beckett would give two-to-one that it had something to do with geometry. Beckett closed his eyes for a moment, to rest them, and to try and focus.
A sharp pain stabbed through his head and all the way down his spine, jerking him awake. The candle on his desk had almost burned down; it was just a lump of smoking wax. His joints no longer ached, they shrieked, and it felt like he was crushing shards of broken glass in his knees every time he moved.
Panic struck, when Beckett realized he couldn’t move his right hand. There was a horrible cramp in it, it felt like the tendons in his fingers had been twisted around each other, like his fingers were out of place. The hand had curled up like a claw, and wouldn’t respond when he tried to move it. It just twisted up harder. It hurt, but it was more terrifying than anything else.
Beckett stumbled around in the dark towards his medicine chest, with his right hand pressed hard under his left arm. The pain was unbearable; a hundred jagged snares of it, behind his eyes, in his arms and legs. The coroner had a brief vision of himself curling up with pain and dying on the floor, inches away from his medicine. He managed to snatch up a hypodermic and a new bottle of veneine and tore off the top with his teeth. Not bothering to measure, he filled the syringe with fang, ripped open his right sleeve, and rammed the drug into his veins.
For a single heart-stopping second nothing happened, and then the relief hit him like a sledgehammer. Beckett barely had time to yank the needle out of his arm before his legs turned to jelly and he collapsed on the ground. He cracked his head on the bedpost as he fell, but barely noticed it. The veneine wrapped its warmth around him, and all the pain and cold in the world seemed a hundred miles away.
Then his vision distorted. His room bulged and shrank, twisted like he was looking at its reflection in the back of a spoon. He blinked, and his nose and mouth were filled with salt water, his ears with the sound of rushing waves.
He was in the stormy, midnight-black ocean that fang-addicts called Cross the Water. It tossed him relentlessly, rolling him in the salty black breaking waves, so he couldn’t tell which way was up or down, couldn’t even try to swim, as his legs and arms were hammered by the force of the waves
And then it was gone. The water rushed away, and Beckett lay gasping for air on a hot, golden surface. His stomach abruptly rejected the brackish seawater, and he vomited it up, struggling to catch his breath over the violent retching.
Beckett looked up, and saw shattered buildings all around him, all made of shining, red-gold metal.
The City of Brass.
Eight: James Crowell in the Arcadium
The narrow, twisting alleys