Constable Harald Increase Frye was bored and pleased to be so. Armistice would be over in two days, and until then Constable Frye was happy to fill out “Not a Significant Incident” reports and send them along to the Coroners at Raithower House. That afternoon, two young men-former servicemen, probably, as at least one limped on an artificial leg-having been taken by the spirit of the season had stumbled into the offices, drunk as skunks in an abbey, and requested that they could sleep the night in the cells. Constable Harald was pleased to oblige them, and doubly pleased to fill out a “Not a Significant Incident” report on the event. When the unmistakable murmur of a gathering crowd outside the office reached his ears, and Constable Harald went outside to discover an impromptu game of dice had broken out in the cobbled streets, Constable Harald was pleased to place a fiver above the line, pleased to accept his loss with dignity, and pleased again to fill out a “Not a Significant Incident” report.
In all, Constable Harald had probably filled out close to a thousand various reports for the Coroners, a task he considered to be usually tedious and wasteful-especially the “Not a Significant Incident” reports. Why, after all, should he be filling out a report on an incident that was, by definition, not significant? What could the Coroners possibly want with such information? Usually, he shirked this responsibility a little, and filled out less than a third of those reports. But after an unpleasantly tumultuous Armistice-with suffragists, if not behaving violently, causing rather more trouble than they ought to be, and the Heretic that attacked the theater-Constable Frye was very, very happy to be able to report that no significant incidents were occurring in his district.
Constable Coates arrived, as the first wave of Trowth’s panoply of church bells began thundering the nine o’clock hour. He’d brought a small cask of barley wine with him, and offered to share it with Constable Frye before they changed shifts. Constable Frye was pleased to oblige him though, notably, he did not fill out an incident report on the subject. Constables Coates and Frye had a wide-ranging discussion then-fueled by the potency of the barley-wine-that touched on many relevant Subjects of the Day. Among those topics were Women’s Suffrage, which was readily agreed on as a dangerous threat to the stability of the nation, and a product of an increasingly liberal education system; the Ettercap War, which Constable Coates believed a trial while it was occurring, but all for the best, in retrospect-Constable Frye, whose brother had lost a hand and part of his left ear during the Gorcia campaign-politely dissented on that score; and finally, the brief but extraordinary success of the play Theocles.
Neither of the two men had seen the play in question, but Constable Frye was fully-prepared with an opinion on the subject, nonetheless.
“’S not that I don’t think we should be makin’ plays about…about anything we like. I think we should be. I think tha’s what plays is for, right? Saying thin’s aloud as maybe you and I are too polite to. And believe me, i’s not like I’m always sure the Emperor-Word bless him and keep him-has always done quite right.” Constable Frye gulped down the last of his barley-wine, and was dismayed to discover that the cask that Constable Coates had brought was nearly empty. “’S just…this is a…’s a challengin’ time is all, and so the…he needs our support.”
“That’s it,” Constable Coates concurred. “S’a challengin’ time. No time f’r dissent.”
“Challengin’, right,” Constable Frye concurred.
“Wit’ suffragists. ‘N them gangsters everywhere,”
Constable Coates concurred yet again, in an effort to saturate the atmosphere with a sense of mutually-agreed on sensibility. “Still, I heard. I heard them sharpsies is still around, too.”
“No,” Constable Frye responded, spoiling Coates’ ambition for universal consensus. “Can’t be. Where?”
“The Arcadum,” Coates insisted. “They’re. Hidin’. Regrouping, I think. Plannin’…you know how they are. Crafty…crafty buggers.”
“There’s no…here, hold on.”
A man, shabbily dressed and with a glazed look in his eye, stumbled through the door of the gendarmerie station.
“Here, sonny,” Constable Frye said, “what’s wrong? You look like death on a plate.”
The man opened his mouth to speak, but produced only a metallic clack-clack-clack sound as his teeth snapped together and open again. He turned his head left and right, up and down at random, as though unable to comprehend his surroundings.
“He’s drunk,” Constable Coates exclaimed-and he was certainly in a position to know.
Constable Frye immediately got up from his chair and attended the man, having some half-conceived notion of escorting him down to the drunk tank, where the stranger could spend the night with his fellow inebriates. He’d managed to get his shoulder under the man’s arm and was guiding him towards the back room, when Constable Coates called out.
“Here. What’s wrong with his tongue?”
The man’s tongue, indeed, the whole inside of his mouth, was black with slimy ichor, as though he’d been drinking it-impossible, of course, as without special treatment, ichor was a fiendish poison to living tissue. “What…what have you been doing, son?” Constable Frye asked, as disused cognitive machinery sought to fight its way through the barley-wine fog. “What’s wrong, then?”
The man opened his mouth again, producing another round of metallic clacking, then the scratchy sound of a bad phonograph. A cultured voice, clearly at odds with the man’s ragged appearance, emerged from his mouth, unaffected by the working of his lips.
“Gentlemen,” said the voice, “I hope you understand that this is nothing personal. If you survive, please give Inspector Beckett my regards.”
The stranger then, awkwardly, as though he barely retained control of his limbs, tore his shirt open. Set into his stomach-edges raggedly stitched into the flesh-was some manner of brass engine, with a large flywheel and a canister of glowing blue phlogiston. Next to it sat a lump of greasy brown material. The wheel began to spin, throwing off tiny blue sparks.
“No, oh,” moaned Constable Frye as he turned to his companion. “Down! Get dow-”
Constable Coates experienced a strange elation then, as the walls shimmered red and brown and turned to high, arching brass vaults. There was a pressure on his ears, a feeling that something had scooped him out from the inside, and now that empty cavity was trying to suck him inwards, causing him to implode. At the same time, he felt divorced from his body as it twisted away, crumpling to the floor, he felt lifted up, floating, as voices from his childhood reached out to him, his mother’s hands on the side of his face, his father’s voice whispering to him, gently telling him he was worthless, useless, stupid, a liar, lovingly telling him he was dying now, and should take a special joy in suffering the eternal discomfiture of the Divine Disharmony, soft claws gripped his soul, and then he was sliding back, back down to his ruined body, away from the whispering voices that warned him he would be back, he could never escape them, never avoid them, they would wait and wait until the sun burned out for him to return to them…
Constable Godwin Coates blinked up at the ceiling which was charred black and dripping grey ash into his eyes. He tried to turn his face away, but could not. He tried to lift his hand and found his left arm unresponsive. His right arm moved, and he flopped it over his chest. He did not feel any pain, felt instead insulated from pain, as though his mind was packed around with wool, a delicate glass bauble suspended in the center of a splintered crate. He tried to swallow and choked on dust and ash instead.
Voices continued to murmur at him, though he was sure these were not real voices, that his hearing had been destroyed by the weapon. He felt sure he could feel, through the cloud of shock, blood trickling from his ears. The voices murmured anyway, and though Constable Godwin Coates was sure that what they were saying was pertinent, desperately important to his situation, he could not apprehend a single word, as though they were speaking just below the threshold of intelligibility. He strained to listen, but the more he concentrated on the voices, the more they seemed to recede, and the more a frenzied panic and an intolerable, fiery pain encroached on the edges of his senses.
He surrendered, and began a series of dry, hacking coughs, spasms in the lungs and throat that grew more desperate and painful as the ash gripped him and no saliva was forthcoming. He wanted to roll over, at least, to turn away from the gray and black-etched ceiling, but he could not. Constable Godwin Coates had no idea how long he stayed there, prone and helpless on the floor, before he saw the man.
A man in a dark charcoal suit with a long, charcoal coat. He had a red scarf wrapped around his face, and his left eye and the flesh around it seemed to be missing, revealing a black pit into the depths of his skull. His short hair was gray and thinning, and he carried a charcoal-covered tricorn hat in his hand. The man knelt down in front of Constable Coates, perhaps was trying to speak to him, though between the man’s red scarf and an incessant, sourceless ringing sound, Coates could not have said for sure.
Wits scattered by the explosion, it took Godwin Coates several seconds to recognize the man in the red scarf as Elijah Beckett; when he did, Constable Coates did his best to speak. He was not certain if he succeeded, because he couldn’t hear himself, but he knew, somehow, that it was desperately important, that he had a vital message to deliver.
“Beckett,” he croaked, or thought he croaked, or hoped he did, at least. “Beckett. It was.” He coughed again-he was dead certain of that, because it felt like someone had reached down his throat and torn out a handful of lung. He took one last, deep, gasping breath, and prayed that his voice was clear.
“Anonymous John.”
The breath left him, and the dark claimed him, and his fear rose to a roiling pitch as it did so. Constable Godwin Coates knew that the voices were waiting for him in the dark.