The Translated Man and Other Stories - Chris Braak [45]
Stitch drew a long, terrible breath. “Beckett will be. Released into. My custody.” His dead muscles creaked as he turned his head towards Valentine. “Valentine. You have. Your orders.”
Mr. Stitch was a Reanimate. He’d been built over a century and half ago by Harcourt Wolfram himself, and was the only Reanimate in the history of the heretical science that hadn’t eventually gone insane and started randomly murdering people. His brain was an ingenious combination of ichor-invigorated human brains and a whirling, nickel-steel difference engine of such brilliance and complexity that its construction had never been replicated. By some uncertain means, nearly a hundred years ago, Mr. Stitch had secured an official royal pardon for himself as an Abomination before Science and the Word. He not only commanded the Coroners Division, but it had been Mr. Stitch, along with Adelwulf Vie-Gorgon, that had created it.
Mr. Stitch was the only other agent in the Coroners that wore the regulation tricorn hat. Dead muscles creaked and rasped again, as Mr. Stitch handed Valentine a folded piece of parchment. It was not uncommon for Stitch to communicate by written missive; his lungs had seen little use since he’d died. They had, in fact, rotted away. Wolfram had replaced them with a kind of billows sewn into his chest.
“You’re interfering…” Edgar Wyndham-Vie took a deep breath as he took in Stitch’s huge form and the dead, leather skin on his face. The stitches from which he took his name were black roads that crisscrossed his face. “You’re interfering with an investigation by the Committee for Public Safety.” The Adjunct managed to gather some fortitude. He pointed imperiously at Beckett. “That man assaulted…he…” his courage seemed to falter. “He was…he stole my coach.”
Stitch drew in a long, painful breath. “I wonder. Why. Was he so interested. In you?”
Edgar Wyndham-Vie’s eyes narrowed dangerously. “You are standing very close to treason, Mr. Stitch.”
Another breath. “I am. Precisely aware. Of how close I. Am standing. To treason.” His voice was without nuance, and deeply frightening, like the tortured sighs of a dying man.
Wyndham-Vie’s complexion went from white to red as the implications of Stitch’s statement became clear. “Him. Arrest him. Arrest them all! I am officially declaring the Coroner’s Division a threat to the safety of the public of Trowth.”
“No. You. Are not.”
“Do it!” Wyndham-Vie screamed at the Lobsterman. “Take him, now!”
The Lobsterman grabbed Mr. Stitch’s arm, and reached for a revolver at his waist. The chemically-modified ichor that pulsed in his veins made him stronger and faster than an ordinary human. But Mr. Stitch was not an ordinary human, and if the Lobsterman had some diluted ichor in his system, Stitch had been pickling in the stuff for a hundred years.
He drew his arm across his body, yanking the Lobsterman off-balance then swung, hard, his great dead, leathery fist hammering into the Lobsterman’s chest. The blow pinned the Marine against the stone wall with a crunch and a hollow-sounding boom. The Lobsterman slid to the ground, a spider’s web of cracks on his bone breastplate. He made small choking sounds, and his eyes rolled back in his head.
Wyndham-Vie went for his gun, but Valentine was faster. He pressed the barrel of one nickel-plated revolver just below Edgar’s ear. “No. Drop it.” Wyndham-Vie pulled the gun from his belt with two fingers, then dropped it on the floor. Valentine kicked it away.
Stitch made a languid movement to the trolljrman, who squeezed by to Beckett’s cell. The huge Reanimate took another ragged breath. “We will take. Beckett. He gave you. An address.”
Valentine stared. “How did you know?”
Mr. Stitch slowly raised his dead hand, and tapped his forehead, where a hundred thousand tiny gears were spinning. “Go.”
Skinner was waiting in the coroner’s coach when Valentine emerged from beneath Montgomery Station. “What happened in there?” She asked, as Valentine climbed