The applause did eventually die down, though its echoes still thundered in Valentine’s ears. He was just about to take his leave of Roger Gorgon-Crabtree-the critic was unlikely to even notice, as he was embroiled in an uproarious, though good-natured, argument with another man-when a commotion amongst the floor seats caught his eye.
The coroner leaned over the edge of the balcony and peered out into the theater. The house lights had been lit again, but the cavernous space was still very dim. Among the audience members, pressing against each other as they began their disordered exit, there was a kind of ripple of anxiety. Valentine couldn’t precisely say what it was, but there was definitely a sense…a tension of palpable and growing intensity.
“What…”
“What?” Roger asked. “What is it?”
“Something…” Valentine replied, unhelpfully.
Voices were raised, tinged with the timbre of hysteria. Men and women began pushing at each other, struggling to get away from something, turning violent in a clear violation of the long tradition of goodwill that was supposed to pervade Armistice. They began moving faster, panicking…
“Something’s wrong. Shit, something’s wrong,” Valentine muttered. He missed his guns. Who carries guns during Armistice? The idea of carrying so much as a pocket-knife was anathema. “Your cane,” he said to Roger. “Give it to me, I…”
A woman screamed, and they both heard the sharp retort of a revolver, followed by a strange crackling echo, as if a hundred phantom revolvers had been discharged in response. There were more raised voices now, and the audience on the floor began to fight each other, crowding into the aisles, climbing over the seats. A green light glimmered near the stage.
“Now!” Valentine snapped, and snatched the cane from Roger’s slack hand. “Shit.” How do I get down? The stairs were too far…but the red curtains that hung down between the boxes. Oh, all right. All right. I always wanted to try this. He stuck the cane into his belt, reached out, and grabbed hold of the plush red fabric, and swung out over the seats…
…and hung there. He had, perhaps, expected that he would slide slowly down the length of curtain, or that it would give way at a reasonably slow rate, gently lowering him to the ground. But the curtain remained stubbornly affixed, and Valentine suddenly found himself wondering if he’d take his skin off trying to slide down it.
“Shit,” he muttered. “Okay. Just…okay.” He kicked out his foot, tried to hook it back over the railing, pull himself back to the balcony, when suddenly the curtain did give way, with a catastrophic ripping sound, and Valentine found himself dropping like a stone with two yards of heavy red fabric coming down on top of him. He landed with a teeth-jarring crash, and immediately began the laborious process of trying to free himself from lengths of cloth.
Finally free and on his feet, Valentine tried to make his way towards the stage, past a streaming, frightened crowd; theatergoers in their clean suits, women with their elaborate hats, terror printed on their faces. There was another gunshot, another peculiar web of echoes. More screams. Valentine stood on the arms of a seat, balanced precariously above the bobbing heads, trying to get his bearings. Two people had been shot-one gentleman in a fine suit, who had been hit in the chest. Red blood stained what had been a snow-white shirt front. He twitched feebly; Valentine could see that he would be dead soon.
A woman lay sprawled across some nearby seats, weeping. Blood stained her dress where she had taken a bullet in the arm. She kept trying to crawl away from the gunman, who now seemed to have completely lost interest in her.
The gunman…two men…three men at least were at the edge of the stage, dressed in identical, ragged blue trousers and shirts. They were waving revolvers around, and green light glimmered from their eyes. They shouted, furiously working to be heard over the noise of the crowd, gesticulating wildly, desperate to make themselves understood. One man was on the theater stage, shouting up into the flyspace, as though he were addressing an adversary hiding in the withdrawn curtains. A second man was kicking at the chairs in the near rows, turning his head this way and that, on a wild hunt for some unknowable prey. A third man clattered around the orchestra pit, knocking down instruments and music stands, his intentions indecipherable.
On each man’s face, glowing from somewhere in the depths of their skulls, was a sharp point of light-bright white at the center, fading to a surreal green at the edges. It made skin and muscle transparent, obscured eyes and features, so that each man appeared to have no face; only a leering skull surrounded by a halo of viridian light. Daemonomaniacs, Valentine thought. He tore the cane free from his belt and held it like a sword. “Out of the way!” He shouted. “Coroners!” All to little effect; the crowd ignored, though it was mercifully thinning.
One of the men fired his revolver off into the air; the other two responded. Yet a fourth sounded right nearby, nearly startling Valentine from his perch. The one who’d fired looked just the same as the others-the same ragged blue shirt, the same green glimmer across his face.
“Here!” The stranger shouted, “It’s going to start here. I’m going to stop it! Don’t you understand? I have to stop…to stop it!” His empty sockets turned towards Valentine, and the coroner could just make out the opaque, jade green sclera of his eyes. He leveled his revolver, and Valentine snapped the cane at his head, aiming right for that weird light on his face…
He felt the walking stick connect, and felt his arm draw back simultaneously, felt himself hesitate a second too long and take a bullet in his chest, felt himself crack the man’s skull before the gun could go off, felt a dozen possible past and future moments fracture in a spiderweb of disrupted causality…
And then the man was gone, and in his place was nothing but the absolute certainty that there had never been anyone there in the first place.
“Aw, nuts.”
The crowd was gone now, pressed to the far exits and finally squeezed outside. Valentine saw five men now with their guns, and two people-a man and a woman-lying across the chairs, bleeding from wounds in their chests. The green-glimmer men were casting about wildly, shouting incoherently about stopping…something.
Of course they were mad. Or, really, he was mad, Valentine realized, as some of the identical-looking men were really causal doppelgangers-a peculiar effect caused by the daemonomania. Four men were weird hallucinations, and their bullets were harmless. One man was real, and definitely deadly. Which one? The young coroner knew he didn’t have the means to tell them apart: though he couldn’t recall precisely, he had a vague and uncomfortable feeling that none of the doppelgangers really were doppelgangers until he actually tried to test one. It had something to do with actualizing lines of causality, and Valentine had actually dozed through much of that lecture when he was being trained.
“This moment is the end,” the men shouted-that, or some variation on it, each glimmering figures words colored by slight causal variations. “This is the last time. This is the edge of now. All past and future moments are echoes of this one!”
Nothing for it, Valentine told himself, grimly. I’ll just have to take them all. He clutched the cane like a sabre and tensed, choosing as his first target the man kicking his way through the orchestra pit. He kept checking under things, as though he were looking for something. Now, or never.
“Valentine!”
The coroner looked around; he’d know Skinner’s voice anywhere. After a second, he saw her in Emilia’s box seat. She stood with her head cocked to the side. Pointing.
Pointing at the doppelganger on the stage, the one that was stamping his feet and frothing. Oh, Valentine Vie-Gorgon thought. Please be right, Skinner.
Like all young men of his economic class, Valentine Vie-Gorgon had an extensive and expensive education. It covered many topics, including the arts, science, literature, politics, and military strategy. It also included training in a number of “gentlemen sports”-a euphemism for the violent soldiering techniques that, as a member of Trowth’s elite high society, Valentine would never be called on to use. They included boxing, wrestling, and, of course, fencing.
It was generally considered true among both habitual fencers and habitual brawlers that there was not any particular difference between hitting a man with a sabre and hitting a man with a long stick-the wound it delivered was different, but, mechanically, the process was essentially the same. All of this is to say that, when Valentine leapt at the daemonomaniac man-dropping low to avoid being shot, kicking his leg out behind him and off at angle in a technically perfect low-long-pass (called a vaeda socz by Sarpeki fencing masters), and thrusting firmly with Roger Gorgon-Crabtree’s cane right below the daemonomaniac’s sternum-he was not altogether mad in thinking that this would be an effective course of action.
Nor was he altogether wrong; the blow was strong and well-placed, and good enough that the daemonomaniac lost his breath and staggered, firing wildly above Valentine’s head. However, in common with many men who have trained as fencers, but have had little opportunity to actually fight with a sword or stick, he was wrong in thinking that this strike alone would be enough to end the fight. It was Valentine’s peculiar luck-the same one thought to accompany drunks and idiots-that the daemonomaniac dropped his gun before leaping on Valentine, as the young man paused after his perfectly-executed lunge.
“Ow, get off!” Valentine said, while the daemonomaniac grunted unintelligibly, and did his level best to get his fingers around the coroner’s throat. “Shit, get…” he lost his balance, and the two crashed heavily to the floor. Valentine tried to get a hold of him, to pin him, to do something, but the man fought with the strength and reckless abandon of a madman, and the light that glared from his face pulsed and grew brighter, seemingly in concert with the daemonomaniac’s desperation.
A gravelly voice shouted, “Hold him! Hold him still!” It was barely audible over the pounding blood and adrenaline in Valentine’s ears. Another figure loomed into his vision and gripped the daemonomaniac by the neck. At once, the struggling man began to relax, his breath returning as his anger left, his voice resolving into strange, muttered inconsistencies. Valentine shoved him away.
“Beckett?” He said, when he caught his breath. “What are you doing here?”
The old man looked at him with one good eye, and one dark red pit where a second should be. He had a brass-furnished syringe in his hand. There was a tiny amount of milky-white veneine still remaining. “He’ll be out for a little while,” Beckett said of the daemonomaniac. “We need to get him somewhere copper-lined and secure, before the doppelgangers manifest again.”
Valentine nodded. “He was saying something…something about ‘it starting here,’ like that…”
“They always say that,” Beckett spat, disgustedly. “Daemonomaniacs think that they can get in touch with some kind of oracle mind so they can predict the future-it always makes them think that something terribly important is about to happen right now, and the only way they can stop it is by shooting people.”
“It’s a hallucination?”
“Probably. Who knows?” Beckett shrugged. “If you think about it, what’s ever happened that couldn’t have been prevented by shooting someone at the right time? How would you know anyway?” He gestured at the comatose man. “They always lose their minds before their predictions come true, anyway. Check his pockets.”
Valentine began at once. “What am I looking for?”
“Another of those pamphlets. That’s why I don’t want this one executed, yet. I want to know where he got it.”
“Are you sure he’s got…oh wait. Here.” The coroner held up a weathered quarto with “The Causal Mind” printed neatly on the first page. “To attune oneself to the daemon that knows the precise location of all the universe’s atomies, and so to know their paths, and so to know the paths of all objects-”
“Enough. We’ll take it to the Church. Or Stitch. Get a report on it. Last thing I need is for you to come under suspicion, too.”
“I’m a coroner, Beckett.”
Beckett snorted. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but the new ministry is keeping a closer eye on us than anyone else. I can’t protect you if they want to take you in.”
“I have-”
“Your name won’t protect you either. Help me get this son of a bitch out of here.”
Grunting, Valentine slung the man over his shoulders and, somewhat wobbly, managed to get to his feet. “So, what are you doing here?”
The old coroner shrugged. “I go to the theater sometimes. Not every day a play comes out with my name on it.”