The Translated Man and Other Stories - Chris Braak [76]
Skinner was waiting for them, seated in precisely the same position and location as when they’d left her, only now wearing a long gray overcoat—giving the appearance of having miraculously apparated the coat onto her person. Karine was busy explaining her cross-referencing system to Alan Charterhouse, who listened with wide-eyed fascination. Beckett could practically see the wheels turning in the young man’s head.
“All right,” Beckett growled. “Let’s get on with this.”
Twenty-four: The Road to Mount Hood
It was almost a relief to leave the city that night. The strange feeling to which Valentine had confessed, the electric urgency, the overwhelming sense of immanence was palpable to all and sundry. Sensible men claimed that, with the destruction of Mud-side, the sharpsies had probably simply fled the city, now to find some new nation that might tolerate them, and good riddance. But the sensible men, sensible as they were, were quite unable to deny the sense of danger that walked the streets that night. Alan Charterhouse and the three coroners left in a heavy, closed, weather-beaten coach pulled by a team of strong but docile horses, hired from the same livery company for which James Crowell had worked. Harry had insisted that his own horses were good enough for the climb up Mount Hood, but Beckett had been resolute.
The coach took them out of the city and to the west, away from the huge, looming forest of stone architecture and bronze statues. They passed the Sentinels: two great statues that, according to legend, had been erected by the Trow. The work of the pseudo-mythical giants had been unearthed nearly two thousand years earlier, when the city was first founded. They were each a hundred feet high, devoid of any mark that might have suggested tool-use, and vaguely human in shape. Yet, there was something eerily alien about the cast of their shoulders, the faint details of their features.
The royal family claimed that these statues were Gorgon and Demogorgon, the two giants that were the founders of the imperial line in Trowth. They represented one of the few places in the city exempt from the Architecture War: no family would build anything less than twenty yards from where the statues stood along High Street as it ran straight as an arrow out from the heart of the city. Gorgon and Demogorgon stood on two bare islands of stone on the line between the city and its ever-widening suburbs.
Though legend claimed that the statues had been gradually, slowly, glacially moving over the course of the last twothousand years, they appeared quite still as the coroners’ coach passed by. It took another hour and a half before the coach had left behind the last of the suburbs on the west. The road followed the Stark up into the mountains.
The route of the Stark was one of long, gentle curves. Fed primarily by mountain springs and runoffs, the river Stark was a deep, swift, wide river, ice-cold and treacherous. It never froze, not even during Second Winter, but any poor soul that fell into the black waters would likely die of hypothermia within minutes. The Stark led the road past the farms that managed to scrape a living out of the rocky soil; there was a sea of corn and wheat stubble everywhere, dotted with the occasional low, dark-windowed farmhouse, sullenly leaking woodsmoke into the air.
The harvested fields bespoke a great desolation, somehow more profound than the ordinary sense that First Winter left in the mind. For miles and miles, there was simply nothing but flat, stony plains and the knotted remnants of the year’s harvest. It was late, and cold, so naturally no one would be about, but there was still a terrible loneliness to this place.
Eventually, the thick, smoky fog of pollution that hung over Trowth gave way to a clear sky, with the moon bathing those bleak fields in a harsh, pale blue-green light. As the blue glow from the lights of the city faded behind the coach, the stars became apparent: tens of thousands of baleful white eyes, watching with undisguised malice.
Is it any