Beckett sat in his office, brooding. He had for the first time that year opened the heavy, green copper-plated shutters on his windows, an indulgence he permitted himself only during the two weeks of Armistice. These were, in fact, the only two weeks when the weather did not bother him in some way; warm enough not to cause his bones to ache, cool enough that he could still wear his suit and scarf without sweating. It would be an exaggeration to say that Armistice is the only time of the year that Beckett actually enjoyed, as “enjoyment” is perhaps too strong a word to describe what Beckett felt about anything, but certainly one could say that Armistice was the two weeks of the year that Beckett found to be the least intolerable.
Ordinarily. Now, the lightening sky and cheery, amiable atmosphere of the city rang hollow in his ears, a false front of friendship piled up, after so many years of tradition, on top of Trowth’s ever-rotten core. There was not, Beckett had been forced to conclude, anything sacred. This was not a revelation that struck him like a thunderbolt, but rather a slow, seeping realization. After many years of work in the Coroners, he had learned that most people did not hold most things sacred, and that those things that above all demanded respect for their sacredness were the ones most likely to be ignored. But he had hoped, or else imagined, or at the very least considered that there were in his world one or two things that everyone chose to respect.
“Should have known better,” he muttered to himself. He looked at his desk, cluttered with paperwork for cases that he would never, could never solve. He felt the ugly weight of the gun in his hand. His mind drifted back to his last conversation with Mr. Stitch.
“You perceive. A. Connection?” The hulking reanimate, still as a corpse behind its desk, had wheezed at him.
“There’s no question,” Beckett had replied. “The pamphlets that are being circulated, they’re all made at the same press. We don’t know where it is, but we’re going to find it. I want to move on these men, now.”
“Impossible.” Stitch replied. “We. Cannot. Find them.”
“You didn’t find anything?” Beckett asked. “Anything at all at the gendarmerie bombing site?”
“Nothing.” Stitch’s voice betrayed no emotion except the constant pain of having to be used at all. “The site. Was entirely. Devoid.”
“We can’t…” Beckett had begun. He felt his voice grow hoarse, and worried that it would crack. He wondered how he could be so desperate about something, after so much time spent in the regular, dispassionate slog of his work. “We can’t let this go. We have to do something.”
“So. Find. Something.”
That was it, and it was depressing. If Stitch and its miraculous engine of a mind couldn’t find anything to connect the bombing and the daemonomaniac and the mysterious pamphleteer, then there was little hope that Beckett would be able to. No leads, no anything, like so many of his cases these days. The number of crimes that could be connected to one of the heretical sciences seemed to grow exponentially, but the tools he needed to prosecute his investigations remained stubbornly old-fashioned. Ask people if they’d seen anything. Question notorious career criminals-this was a tradition, and a fairly useless one; since heretics were executed on the spot, there were generally very few people who could rightly have been said to have made a career of them. One advocate in the Royal Academy of Sciences insisted that it was possible to determine a heretic by precisely measuring the shape of his head, but he wanted funding for his experiments before he could produce any worthwhile results, so that was fairly a bust.
Nothing. Beckett looked down at his gun again, felt the black iron call to a black spot in his heart, numb and raw and cold. He stared at the barrel, watched it grow, stretching out to encompass him, its dark, empty core drawing him down, down into it with an inexorable gravity. The principle seemed remarkably easy. The barest twitch of his finger would be enough, the gun would do all the work. Wasn’t it quite extraordinary that so much pain, so much weariness, could abolished with such a small, simple step?
“Mr. Beckett?” The boy’s voice was soft; he had crept into Beckett’s office without the old coroner hearing.
“Alan?” Beckett shook his head and looked up. Of course it wasn’t Alan, Alan had disappeared, escaped to Corsay probably. It was James, the new knocker. His face was pale and pinched, his jaw always clenched as though he were perpetually fighting back nausea. Ruddy light from the windows reflected off of his silver eyeplate. The plate had been set improperly, and now a string of syrupy black ichor dribbled down his cheek. “James. What?”
“I…”
“What is it, boy? Speak up,” Beckett snapped at him, as he set his revolver back on his desk.
James sighed, but said nothing for a long moment. Then, “I was in Gorcia, did you know that, Mr. Beckett?”
Beckett allowed, privately, that he had indeed known that, though he hadn’t given it much thought. To the knocker he simply said, “Yes. So?”
“I was at the Proc Offensive. Got…a lot of men had trouble, after that. Going into the caves, I mean. Do you know about it?”
“No,” Beckett said, simply.
“It was bad. They moved me off of that, afterward. To Quartermasters.” The knocker was silent again.
Beckett grunted. “Get to the point, boy. What is it?”
“I want…I need to be sure. Have you been in the army, Mr. Beckett?”
The old coroner rolled his eye but was, in spite of himself, intrigued. “Third dragoons. One battle, in the Dragon Isles.”
“Where?”
“Kaarcag.”
The knocker perceptibly shivered when he heard that. “You were at…? Kaarcag was a massacre.”
Beckett closed his eye and experienced a momentary flash of thorny green vines pouring from Fletcher’s mouth. “We knew it going in, that it was an ambush. You couldn’t help but see.”
“But you went in.”
“We went in. Took ninety percent casualties. The rest of us were discharged.”
“Why did you do it? Why didn’t you stop?”
“You don’t get to stop. The army falls apart if you stop following your orders. Even when you know they’re bad…you still have to do it. Suck it up, hope for the best.”
James nodded. “I can’t…I can’t tell you how I know about this. But. The Empire…has been producing oneiric munitions.”
The statement should have landed in Beckett’s mind like a cannonball, and yet he found himself unsurprised. There was very little he was willing to put past the Empire, these days.
“They were for use in Gorcia,” James went on. “When the war ended, most of them were destroyed. Some were brought back to the country. There’s a depot in the city. In Small Ash Abbey. The man that runs it is…not altogether trustworthy. I have reason to believe he may be selling his stock…”
“When?”
James was quiet; he cocked his head to the side, twisting himself as though trying to avoid Beckett’s gaze, though he had no direct experience of it.
“Tonight.”
“Why didn’t you tell me? Why didn’t you tell Stitch?”
James grimaced, painfully. His face twitched, he seemed almost about to cry. “Orders, Mr. Beckett. You know how…how it is. Sometimes the men…the men you work with. They aren’t always…but you can’t just…” His voice dropped to a barely-audible whisper. “…you can’t turn on them. I told you because I thought you’d understand. I don’t know what Stitch understands.”