The Translated Man and Other Stories - Chris Braak [30]
The humans and sharpsie apparently continued their heated discussion at some length before one of the dockworkers had enough, and smashed a bottle of whiskey over John Sharpish’s head. The sharpsie staggered and nearly fell into the river, but came back angry and out for blood. While the four men had certainly seen sharpsie jaws before, and abstractly recognized the danger presented by long, curved sharpsie teeth, they had certainly never seen those teeth put to such ferocious use.
This particular John Sharpish managed to sever the gendarme’s cudgel-hand at the wrist with a single bite, and then nearly took the head off of the second. He bit almost deep enough to sever the spinal column, but certainly deep enough to kill the man instantly. The dockworkers, apparently armed with cudgels of their own in addition to bottles of liquor, immediately fell upon the sharpsie, beating him severely with clubs and fists.
The two men did not stop until the sharpsie had been ground to a pulp on the cobblestones by Old William’s Bridge. Only after he was dead did they make an attempt to find help for the two gendarmes.
The man without a throat was clearly lost. The man who had lost his hand was taken in at a trolljrman hospital the instant it was revealed that he’d lost the limb to a sharpsie. In an act of startling generosity, Hahd Khat, a clutch-mother at the hospital, offered to pay for both the surgeries and funeral expenses of the gendarmes.
Nine: The City of Brass, Skinner
Seeing the City of Brass wasn’t the same thing as being awake in a strange place. It was more like dreaming a familiar place; the City of Brass had the quality of a half-submerged memory, but it was like no place that Beckett had ever visited. It was a fragment from an imaginary childhood, and a person only ever saw it deep in dreaming.
Like a dream, there was no stability to the vision. Background became foreground, and the brass towers twisted to resemble whatever idle thoughts crossed the mind, or else they slipped away like water through clenched fists. Beckett could see through his own eyes, and also see himself standing among the shifting towers. Sometimes he wore his heavy coroner’s overcoat, sometimes he wore nothing. Sometimes the Fades were worse, making large tracks of skin and flesh invisible, disappearing his hands; sometimes, the Fades had completely vanished.
The tall golden towers loomed over him, sometimes very far, sometimes very near. The only constant was the blank black sky overhead, and the huge, yellow-green moon that cast its sickly light on the brass towers. Somehow, Beckett could also see the dark, wooden corners of his room, the intricate whorls of plaster on the ceiling above him as he stared at it.
He was in the city, though Elijah Beckett could not have said how he knew it was a city. The brass towers had no doors or windows, nothing that resembled architecture of any kind. They were clearly made of metal, but in many places they looked like melted wax. The city did not extend forever; it was surrounded by empty black space on all sides—an island of shiny towers beneath the foul moonlight.
A shape moved in the shadow of a brass spire, and Beckett found himself suddenly closer to it. Not close enough that he could see it clearly, but close enough that he worried about attracting its attention. The shape was hunched and black, snuffling close to the ground.
The Reanimate, Beckett thought, the idea clear in his mind as ideas in dreams sometimes are. I’m dreaming about the Reanimate. No… it couldn’t be the Reanimate, because it wasn’t really black at all. It was a kind of blue-purple, like a bruise. Was that a robe that it wore, or skin that hung from its limbs in saggy folds?
Then he saw an arm extricate itself from the hunched