The Translated Man and Other Stories - Chris Braak [52]
“I know, I know! But I had to see what it was doing in the factory. There was a man there, I don’t know who he was, but he had a rifle. I figure he was the one that took the shot at me. And his whole neck and jaw are just one big, purple bruise, and his eyes are all bugged out. There’s blood coming out of his mouth, right, but get this: ectoplasm. Sticky little strands of it, dribbling all over the ground.” Valentine lowered his voice to a dramatic whisper. “The thing had…somehow…ripped the life out of him.”
“What about the coachman?”
“Gendarmes had found the body by the time I got back to it. I was in less of a hurry; I knew how he died.”
Skinner was silent for a long moment. What Valentine had done had been, on many, many levels, astonishingly stupid. Or at least, it would have been astonishingly stupid if it had been someone other than Valentine, whose ridiculously irrational decisions came so regularly that they’d lost all power to astonish. On the other hand, what he said was…well, it was something. “What do you think it was?”
“I don’t know. Not human, definitely. And not a Reanimate.”
“Could it have been Khadavri?”
“I don’t think so. Not a Lich. Maybe one of the Princes. But they . . . they drink blood, don’t they? Or something? They don’t suck the life out of people.”
Actually, popular wisdom had it that the Dragon Princes had to bathe in hundreds of gallons of blood to preserve their monstrous existence. It was probably not worth running down a lone gunman. “You think this is connected to Zindel.”
“It’s a weird coincidence if it’s not. Man gets murdered, the next day his coachmen gets murdered by a sniper, who is then murdered by some kind of a monster. Also, I was thinking. The wounds from the sharpsies…on Zindel’s family? All over the throat and jaw? That’s right where this rifleman had his bruises.” Valentine sighed, and Skinner heard the creak of the chair as he leaned back in it. “I really wish Beckett were here.”
Skinner nodded her quiet assent, and sipped at her tea.
The raids in Red Lanes had petered out by mid-day, when Valentine found himself running for his life in Old Bank. In fact, the men that had been conscripted to chase him had been serving double-duty: both as pressmen for the War Powers Ministry, and in the gendarmerie in the New Bank district. They had stumbled into Wyndham-Vie’s way while on their way back to their home turf from the shipyards. When they failed to persuade the guards at Raithower House that their borrowed authority gave them the right to enter and arrest Valentine, the gendarmes decided to knock off back to New Bank.
They had forgotten about, or else were unconcerned by, the fact that they were still wearing the gear that they used for pressganging. This proved to be a most unfortunate oversight on the part of the gendarmes-cum-pressmen. The ten men, one on horseback, slouched down the hills in Old Bank until they came to Hightower Square.
The edifices on Hightower Square had been in the Crabtree-Daior family for over a hundred years, and were a securely-held beachhead that the Family had long been attempting to use to break into the Vie-Gorgon-controlled New Bank district. However, as part of a piece of legislation served through the Committee for Public Safety, the Wyndham-Vies had managed to get the rights to supplant the intricately-carved floral downspouts characteristic of Crabtree-Daior design with the leering gargoyles that the Wyndham-Vies themselves favored. They had been replacing a great deal of stonework over the last few weeks, and had hired twenty sharpsie day-laborers to do it.
Word of the pressgangs had preceded Valentine’s pursuers as they stumbled into Hightower Square. The sharpsie workers panicked when they saw the boiled breastplates and greenglass goggles. The sharpsies, frightened, moderately organized, and armed with hammers, chisels, and chunks of stone, determined that they would not be sent to Gorcia that day.
The ten men thought to put up a fight, but they were exhausted and outnumbered. They didn’t stand a chance. The sharpsie workers