The Translated Man and Other Stories - Chris Braak [9]
The sun had not yet risen, and would not for two or three hours. Winter nights in Trowth were long. The sky overhead was black, but the street was already filling up. Westbridge, while not as important a thoroughfare as High Street or the Mile, was in a densely populated neighborhood. Street vendors had brought their carts, and begun hawking onions and leeks, selling meat pies, eggs, and milk. Men sick with scrave, or the fades, or simple poverty had left the relative shelter of archways and alleys in order to eke out a meager living as beggars.
Valentine was waiting for him, sitting behind the wheel of his ridiculous horseless carriage. It was almost the same shape as a regular carriage, but longer, and with smaller wheels. The thing was powered by a great phlogiston engine that looked like a brass pot-bellied stove. It clattered noisily and pumped little clouds of bluish smoke into the air. The burning phlogiston smelled like blood, cloying and metallic, but it was a smell that all of Trowth had long since grown used to. Valentine himself wore the driving goggles and white scarf that were apparently requisite attire.
“What’s this?” Beckett shouted over the noise of the engine. “Where’s Skinner?”
“She’s at the scene already!” Valentine shouted back. “I’m to take you there immediately! Come on, I’ve got a meat pie for your breakfast!” He handed Beckett something wrapped in parchment. It smelled like meat and onions, and Beckett found his mood, if not soaring, at least picking itself up out of the gutter, and maybe dusting itself off a little. His nose might be gradually fading away, but at least it still worked.
“How can you stand to drive this thing?” Beckett shouted, as he unwrapped his pie. “It sounds like someone murdering a hundred suits of armor with a wrench!”
“What?” Valentine shouted back.
Beckett resisted the urge to punch him, and instead began to eat the pie.
Three: The Crime
Valentine drove them at a reasonable, if stinking and shuddering pace, to North Ferry, a neighborhood close to the clean end of the Stark, farther up from where the collective sewage and offal of the city began to run into it. It was home to mostly merchant-class families, and some of the less-esteemed Families. The houses were done in Feathersmith-Daior style, which favored simple, peaked roofs tastefully accented with bronze metal work, but they were gradually losing ground to the innumerable gables and the armies of grotesque gargoyles that the Wyndham-Vies were putting everywhere.
Outside of the house at 612 Bynam Lane was a carriage with the crest of the Coroners on the door: the silhouette of a two-headed eagle on a bronze shield. The cab was parked directly in front of the small bridge that led to the house; the front door had clearly once been a third-storey window before Bynam Lane had been built above the crumbling Thurgood Street. There was a gap between the Bynam and the fronts of the houses that it faced. The gap was fenced off by tall, greening bronze pickets. Leaning against the pickets were half-a-dozen rough-looking gendarmes, more than a few sporting the facial brands that marked them as “reformed” thieves or perjurors.
“Well, who invited the goon squad?” Valentine cut the engine on his carriage, and coasted to a stop about twenty feet from the gendarmes and the coach.
One of the gendarmes, a tall man with a large, drooping moustache, was standing at the coach and shouting at someone inside. Like his fellow hooligans, he wore a long black coat with several torn strips of dark blue cloth tied around his right arm. He had a truncheon in his right hand and, Beckett suspected, at least a sword at his belt, possibly a revolver.
“—don’t care who you work for, you silly twat—” The man shouted.
“—I will not