The Translated Man and Other Stories - Chris Braak [60]
Oneiristry was a science forbidden by the Church Royal, and under other circumstances Beckett would have questioned the sick man’s exposure to it. Instead, he found himself preoccupied with what the man was saying. “He told me about towers,” Beckett said. “There’s something familiar about it.”
The trolljrman shook its great, reptilian head. Its feathered crest rose and sank in a gesture of dismissiveness. “There is no sense,” it rumbled. “He speaks words he knows, over and over, without reason.” Because it had no lips, the trolljr had to make “r” sounds with its tongue. The word came out “uhdeason.”
“I had a dream about him,” Beckett said. “Just now. I dreamt I heard him speaking.”
The trolljrman nodded. “His dreams,” this sounded like “duhdeams.” The trolljrman gently but firmly guided Beckett away from the bed and into the room. “His dreams are wounded. Bleeding. We must keep him away from others. But your…” The trolljrman hesitated, and rumbled something in its deep, nearly-subsonic language. “Clutch-father? War-father? Captain.” It seemed satisfied with this word choice. “Your captain wanted you somewhere private.”
That must have been Mr. Stitch. Beckett tried desperately to remember what chain of events had brought him here, but it was all just black. The previous . . . hours? Days? “How long have I been here?”
“You have slept for twelve hours.”
That wasn’t especially long, but Beckett did not relish the idea that he was losing time on his investigation. Flashes of the last day bloomed from the dark. Valentine and Skinner were going to go to the address in Old Bank. Had they found anything? And what was Stitch up to? “I have to go. I have to get to Raithower House. Where am I anyway? What is this place?”
“Ghahat Dhu Hospice. We are in North Ferry, but I cannot let you leave.”
Ghahat Dhu was a tolljr brood-mother, and known throughout the city as a surpassing surgeon, among a species whose capacity for surgery was held to be miraculous. “I’m fine, really.” Beckett’s knees wobbled dangerously. “I just need something to eat. I’m in the middle of an investigation, I have to go.”
“No,” the trolljrman thundered. “It is dangerous—”
“—just give me my gun—”
“There is a psychestorm.” The trolljrman showed Beckett out of the dream-sick man’s room, and into a small parlour. Its walls had tall windows cut in them that were now covered with burnished copper shutters, and it was furnished with a few stuffed chairs and a small table on which rested a covered dish. A sweet, spicy smell wafted to Beckett’s nose, and his stomach growled. He was suddenly conscious of how very hungry he was.
The veneine addict walks a fine line through his sensorium. Too much of the drug shrouds the mind and eyes and skin with thick cotton. It’s warm and it mutes the pain, but it divorces the man from himself and the world, eventually leading the mind away to that strange, other destination that lurked at the extremity of fang. Less veneine enables a man to feel, to keep his mind sharp, to stay in touch with the world, but it also leaves him vulnerable to the constant, intolerable anguish of his life.
This was the line that Beckett vacillated across as he sat down to his meal. There was just enough veneine to keep his joints from aching, but not quite enough to keep him divorced from himself. The terrible enormity of what he faced, of a murder he couldn’t solve, a city gutted of its youth and industry, racial tensions that were threatening to explode, of the rest of his life—a few long years gradually being eaten away by his disease—settled on his shoulders like a mountain. The soft tissue around his eyes shriveled and his breath caught. It was too much. He wanted to sit, to lie down, to weep, to tear his ravaged face from his skull. It was too much.
Beckett imagined just staying at the hospice. He could stay