The Translated Man and Other Stories - Chris Braak [29]
The thing, still fifteen or twenty feet away, was abruptly very still. In the blink of an eye it was five feet away, almost close enough that it could reach out and touch Crowell. It hadn’t moved so much as . . . slithered, or slipped. It crossed the space strangely, like its joints weren’t put together right. It swayed back and forth like a snake, then craned its head towards Crowell. It’s face was masked by black robes and shadow, but Crowell could see it turning, could hear vertebrae clicking as it twisted its head almost all the way around. There was a hideous wet slithering sound that came from beneath the thing’s tattered black cloak.
Without warning, the thing snapped its head around to look up and off, at a precariously slanted upper storey to Crowell’s left. There was a loud, sudden crack like a gunshot, and James Crowell felt a hot knife jab through his chest. Puzzled, he looked down to see blood pouring from a hole in his shirt. Funny. Thought I had that hole fixed…he twisted around in time to see the filthy man lunge towards a deep doorway on the opposite side of the street, glittering silver in his hands.
James Crowell’s legs suddenly felt very, very tired, and it was astonishingly easy to let them fold up, and to lay his face on the ground. Stunned, he closed his eyes. Blackness gripped his head like a vice.
“Coroners!” Crowell heard someone call out, as though from the end of a long tunnel. “No one moves!”
That same evening, between the time that Beckett began to see the City of Brass and James Crowell met with misfortune in Red Lanes, a young sharpsie male found himself walking back to Mudside from the shipyards alone. The next day, the broadsheets would say John Sharpish—which was the name that all the broadsheets used to refer to sharpsies, rather than try to transliterate their guttural native names—was swaggering brazenly, with a cruel look in his eye, shouting insults at women and threatening to eat their babies. At the time, however, the witnesses that had so conscientiously made their reports to the broadsheets would have been hard-pressed to say that the sharpsie was doing anything out of the ordinary, except perhaps walking very quickly.
Whether John Sharpish had been hurrying because he was eager to be home or because he was nervous about being in human-dominated neighborhoods will remain a mystery, but his concerns about his environs were certainly borne out. As he passed through River Village, a quaint neighborhood that consisted almost entirely of public houses, warehouses, and extremely cheap brothels, John Sharpish found himself accosted by four men.
Two of the men were gendarmes; two were dock-workers that had either volunteered or were conscripted for the task of eliminating the vermin from River Village. The surviving gendarme would later say that he’d been doing his solemn duty, to protect the health and well-being of the good people that had hired him. One of the two dock workers would say that he’d just been defending himself when the sharpsie had come at him, all teeth and murder on its face. The fourth man would remain stubbornly silent, asserting only that he’d “done what he had to.”
The sharpsie had been moving at a quick clip through River Village, which represented a shorter but potentially more dangerous path back to Mudside. Sharpsies were no less welcome on the other side of the Stark in Bluewater, the indigeae ghetto, but there were fewer there with the means or the interest in physically removing them. The indigeae didn’t care for the sharpsies, but didn’t especially hate them either. Bluewater was safe, but River Village was faster; to safely traverse it, however, a young sharpsie needed to be quick.
It didn’t help. The four men caught up with John Sharpish right at the foot of Old Williams’ Bridge: the stone road that led over the Stark and into Mudside. The bulk of the conversation between the four men and the sharpsie was never accurately reported in the broadsheets. Some people said they heard only shouting, some said they heard insults,