The Translated Man and Other Stories - Chris Braak [67]
The trolljrman brushed past Beckett. “Leaving,” he said, on his way out. “Will come for my money.”
The old sharpsie grunted something to the coroner, then began gesturing to a spot on the floor, which was made of wood. He pulled up something that looked like a trapdoor, and Beckett looked down to see a wooden set of stairs leading off into the dark. The old sharpsie was grinning, because that’s all that sharpsies ever did, but it seemed that the old man was pleased to see Beckett’s surprise.
Of course, Mudside was built on mud. Old buildings sank slowly into it, new buildings were built on top. It would take regular work to maintain the old buildings, replacing rotting wood, building supports and struts. But it could be done; the sharpsies could have built themselves an entire network of tunnels beneath Mudside. Just like the Arcadium, Beckett thought, wryly.
The sharpsies had begun dropping through the hole in the floor. The old man waited until the last of his people had dropped in, then cocked his head quizzically. Beckett considered the dank, dark, claustrophobic wooden tunnels of Mudside, piled over with tons of mud and ramshackle wooden homes.
“No,” he said. “You go. I’ll find my own way out.”
The Imperial Committee for Public Safety had come in force to the sharpsie shanty-town on the shores of the Stark. Despite the recent violence, the sharpsies appeared unprepared for the attack. The Committee came with a thousand gendarmes, their blue armbands prominent. They’d enlisted another half a hundred pressgangers, and had apparently bought enough greenglass goggles to outfit the entire army, enabling it to see clearly in the poorly-lit neighborhood even after night had fallen.
Panic spread through the community, as frightened youths sprinted down narrow alleyways and crawled into narrow bolt-holes, fleeing the gendarmerie with desperate terror. Though the Committee had caught the sharpsies unprepared, the omphaloskepsis were well-practiced at avoiding authorities. Within an hour, Mudside had been almost completely abandoned, with only a few, scant possessions left behind. Somehow, thousands of sharpsies managed to disappear into the city. The gendarmes brought great barrels of phlogiston, and set the ramshackle wooden homes on fire, in the hope of smoking out any remaining inhabitants.
Roughly a hundred fled the flames and ran into the waiting leg-irons of the Committee’s soldiers and pressgangers. Another hundred burned to death beneath their own homes, but their deaths were not noted. Mudside took approximately six hours to burn to the ground, leaving acres of black ash next to the Stark. The thousands of remaining sharpsies were nowhere to be found.
The Committee for Public Safety suspected that they’d fled into the Arcadium, and advised all citizens without urgent business there to avoid it. It did not suggest what the poor squalid citizens that actually lived there ought to do. The Committee for Public Safety assured all the moderately- and very-wealthy citizens that lived topside that the Sharpsie Threat would soon be contained, and that John Sharpish would no longer terrorize the streets of Trowth, murdering innocent families in their homes.
Twenty-Two: The Coachman’s Son
“The storm’s been clear for hours,” Valentine said that evening, as he peered through the crack between the shutters. From his vantage-point in Raithower House, he could not see the lurid, ruddy glare of Mudside burning. “Do you . . . do you want me to take you home?”
Skinner shook her head. The events of the previous night had upset her immensely, but after a few hours sleep, and without the psychestorm and its traumatic effects on her senses, she was itching to do something. “We should….I don’t know. We need to keep going. The longer we wait, the more steps Wyndham can take to cover his tracks.”
The two coroners were in the parlour-room office on the first floor. Valentine flopped into one of the overstuffed chairs. “I wish we knew where Beckett is.”
“We can’t wait for him. If he was as…,” she paused,