The Translated Man and Other Stories - Chris Braak [44]
“Beckett! What’s wrong with him? What did you fucking do to him?”
The moon was wide as wide as the sky and he wasn’t floating up to it but falling towards it, and there were cities of black basalt teeming like termite colonies across its surface and there were things that lived there.
“Beckett!” There was a hand on his arm, a hard real hand, not soft like the hands in his mind.
The old coroner grabbed a hold of his mind through nothing more than force of will. “V-valentine…?” He rattled, gasping for breath. “Wh-…”
“Elijah, it’s all right, we’re getting you out of here…”
“Why did you…” he gasped and almost choked again on saltwater. “…leave…the cordon…”
“I’ll explain it to you later. We have to get you out of here.”
His vision swam and then, for a moment, was mercifully clear. The cold, merciless iron that was the core of Beckett’s being seized control. The pain temporarily took a place backstage, the rushing sound in his head died away, as Beckett grabbed Valentine by his shirt-front. He stared at the young man’s narrow, angular face, at his dark eyes. “No! Stitch will do it.” He coughed, and yanked hard on Valentine’s shirt. “Wyndham… took . . . eighteen. . . .”
“Wyndham took eighteen what? What are you talking about? Elijah? Elijah!”
The world was fading the moon swelled up beneath him. “Eighteen twenty.” The choking fist was in the back of his throat again. “Corimander Street.”
Another wave of agony shook him. Beckett screamed and curled up on the ground, as someone hit him over and over in the face with a hammer, and then: darkness.
Valentine slowly rose to his feet after Beckett had collapsed into unconsciousness. It’s the veneine, flushing from his system, he thought. Or else it’s the fades. Is that what they do to you? Tear you apart from the inside, while they make your outsides transparent? The young coroner turned to where Edgar Wyndham-Vie stood at the end of the hall. They were deep beneath Montgomery Station, where the Committee for Public Safety kept its cells. The ceiling was low, and curved all the way to the ground on either side, leaving little room for a prisoner to even stand.
“He needs to be released.” Valentine told the other man. “Now.”
“He assaulted my person,” Edgar Wyndham-Vie said. “He stole my family’s carriage. I found him trying to break into a restricted-access Vault in Old Bank…”
Valentine bore down on him, and brought his face very close to the other man’s. “He said you took something. Eighteen-twenty Corimander Street.”
Edgar swallowed. “Perjury. He is the thief. And a liar. He has a vested interest in impugning my character…”
It took every ounce of willpower Valentine had to not draw his revolver and gun Wyndham-Vie down right then and there. This was quite a feat; Valentine was a man used to indulging his whims. “Right. He had to execute your cousin for heresy, and he’s got the vested interest—”
“Considering the crimes levied against him,” Wyndham-Vie interrupted, “I’m petitioning for a full inquest into my cousin’s murder—”
“—execution—“
“Murder.” Wyndham-Vie sneered at him. “Family name notwithstanding, Valentine, you should be careful. I could have you held as an accessory.”
This time, Valentine really would have shot the man, despite the red-armored Lobsterman at Wyndham-Vie’s back, had not another voice cut into their conversation.
“Unacceptable.” The voice was a rasping sound, the kind three voices might make if they’d been crammed together into one big voice and then torn apart a smaller, fourth one.
Edgar Wyndham-Vie blanched. “This…this isn’t…”
Mr. Stitch limped slowly down the hallway towards the two men. The steel braces on his lower legs clanked loudly on the stone. His eyes, which looked like microscope eyes, brass mounts with clear glass lenses in them, were utterly expressionless as he stared at Wyndham-Vie, and practically dragged his seven-foot-tall frame towards him. A trolljrman, at least as tall as Stitch, followed close