“Well,” said Valentine, “I did say-”
“Yes.” Skinner said, a little more forcefully than she might have intended. “Yes you did, I should have listened, your cousin is an unconscionable monster, et cetera and so forth, I would like to move on to the next stage of the conversation, now.”
“All right, all right.” Silver and porcelain scraped delicately against each other, as Valentine added sugar to his tea. It was late to be drinking tea, but neither of them found themselves predisposed to sleep. “Well, obviously, you can stay here for as long as you like-”
“I-”
“I know, I know you don’t want to stay here for long. I’m just saying that you can. I suppose that going back to your family isn’t an option?”
Skinner thought back on her parents’ tiny house in Lower West Seagirt, her mother surrounded by piles of strangers’ laundry that she would clean and mend while her father slept the days away, recuperating from his night-shift at the mill. The house deathly quiet and suffocatingly hot, its ever-changing topography of laundry making it impossible to navigate. The unconquerable gap between mother and daughter whose spheres of experience were utterly alien to each other.
“No,” Skinner said, quietly. “Not really.”
“So. All right, you just need to get your own place. I could rent it for you, that’s fine. I mean, it’s ridiculous that a grown woman should have to do that…’sword, I’m starting to sound like a suffragist.”
“You could do worse.”
“Yes, I suppose I could.” Valentine slurped his tea, noisily. “Have you got any money? I’ve got…well, my father has an estate agent who’s been looking at properties down by Arsenal Close, that’s not too bad a neigborhood.”
Skinner shook her head. “The theater has all the royalties from the play. I spent my last wages from the Coroners months ago.” She clenched her jaw and slowly cracked the knuckles on her right hand, one at a time. “I didn’t realize,” Skinner said, furious at herself but still trying to keep her voice level, “that I was living on Emilia’s sufferance.”
“Ahm,” Valentine replied, in a way he probably imagined was consoling. “You wouldn’t be the first person to make that mistake. Well, I could give you-” He drowned this sentence in a coughing fit as he saw Sknner’s expression. “No, well. Well there’s got to be a way…I mean, the playhouses have never been afraid of shirking the law before. You know theater-people, they’ll do anything. Surely you could get work…?”
“No,” Skinner said. “I can’t prove I’ve written anything. Everything was kept so secret. It’s a shame, too; now that Theocles is on the Black List, it would probably sell like gangbusters.”
“Yes…oh. Oh!”
“What is it?”
“I’ve just devised a plan. A good plan. Oh, this feels nice. Is it always like this?”
“Is what like what?”
Valentine began chuckling to himself. “I can’t tell you! I can’t tell you about it yet, it will be a surprise.” He was on his feet at once pacing back and forth, rubbing his hands together. “This is excellent, oh my! I’ve got some leave coming from the Coroners,” Valentine said. “A few weeks, anyway, that I can take. Beckett will hardly miss me. You heard about the raid on Front Street? He’s got a fire under him now. You know how he gets. He’s like a bullet now, he’ll be tearing Anonymous John’s organization apart for weeks. He probably won’t even notice that I’m gone.”
“Valentine, what are you going to do? You have to tell me.”
“No! It is a plan both cunning and secret. I will say no more about it!” He stopped pacing. “Now, I shall go check to make sure that Karine is settled in all right.”
“Oh.”
“What?”
Skinner shrugged. “Nothing. Go on. I’ve got to try and get some sleep.”
“Uhm. Yes. Right, so do I. At the office. Where they have cots.”
“Yes.”
Valentine cleared his throat. Then cleared his throat a second time. Then said, “Yes. Well. Good night.”
“Good night, Valentine.”
Valentine Vie-Gorgon hesitated only for a moment before discreetly leaving the young lady to her room, exchanging another polite “good night” with Karine, and then leaving his house and stepping into the pouring rain.
Beckett lay on his back, staring at the disorder of plaster swirls on his ceiling. He could feel the exhaustion, in some distant orbit around his body, separated by vast tracts of empty space and the gentle warmth of the veneine. It never came to claim him, though. He’d been using djang-small, concentrated amounts of the stuff that people drank to wake themselves up in the morning-in order to combat the lassitude that the increasingly large doses of veneine brought on.
The doctors told him that he’d likely eventually hit a balance. The veneine would make him tired, the djang would pick him up; in the right proportion, he’d soon reach a kind of equilibrium that would put him back to normal, only with no pain. If that was true, the miraculous balance he hoped to achieve was a long way off. Right now, the djang stopped him from sleeping, but the veneine muddled his thoughts enough that he couldn’t think of anything to do but lie in bed and stare at the ceiling.
Sometimes, little snippets of memories would swim up from the murky depths of his mind, fuzzy kirliotypes of past that he thought he’d forgotten. They were never did more than border on the significant. He remembered the Dragon Isles campaign, but the memories that floated up were images of learning to use the bolt-action on his rifle, or Fletcher sitting in the front of the boat, smoking a cigar. Beckett saw images from his childhood, too-the day his father patched a pair of Beckett’s boots. Some Armistice from decades ago, when he walked to school carrying a weathered little primer that had been used by generations of students before him. Listening to a record in his office at Raithower House.
None of these memories meant anything, as far as Beckett could ascertain. They just flickered through his head, as though some trapdoor had been carelessly left open to emit a deluge of trivial incidence. Or as though, now that Beckett was at the end of his life, his granite-hard personality was slowly coming undone. The long years of building filters to sort the meaningful from the irrelevant were unspooling, the filters were breaking down, one day he’d be drowned in a flood of his own pointless experiences.
Not for the first time, Beckett considered an early leave from the mess. The spectre of an old age dominated by senility and physical anguish was not appealing. Nor was the prospect of a retirement spent drugged into oblivion, letting the fades gobble him up inch by unrelenting inch while he let his mind drift among hallucinogenic fantasies of black water and brass cities. Surely there was no shame in punctuating a life such as his-one with accomplishments that any reasonable human being could be proud of, one in which a difference was made, however small-with a clean and honorable exit, to forgo the inevitable humiliation of decrepitude?
A gentle chill crept into his body, and he could not feel himself shiver. His vision began to slowly contract, the plaster details of the ceiling blurred. Beckett blinked something from his eye and turned his head. His red scarf hung over the sill of the window, which was buttoned up tightly against the raw spring air. For a moment, Beckett was seized with a desire to snatch the scarf up and rip it to pieces, or toss it into the fire.
The moment passed. Beckett got up instead, glimpsed briefly at himself in the small mirror above his vanity. Dressed in his shabby smallclothes, body gruesomely marred by the fades, he looked like a man with one foot in the grave. Which Beckett supposed he must be. He dressed in his charcoal-colored suit, wrapped his red scarf around his mouth and nose, and decided it was not too early to go to work, after all.
Because of Trowth’s notoriously inclement weather, its rapid fluctuations in temperature, and its perpetually salty air, it was practically impossible for any large machine to function with any kind of reliability. Discrepancies in function were often small, but could be compounded in an engine that was required to run all the time. Nowhere was this more apparent than the clocks of Trowth.
With every passing second, the massive brass machines sitting atop office buildings and churches and bourses grew ever more slightly away from synchrony. A small army of mechanics, employed by the Committee on Chronography, a sub-division of the Ministry of Civic Well-Being, worked tirelessly throughout the week in order to keep them running smoothly, efficiently, and, most importantly, accurately-but their task was ultimately futile. There were simply too many clocks, and the differences in time were often close to imperceptible.
This was all further compounded by the fact that, according to royal decree, the clock at the top of Vie Abbey should be the clock from which all others took their measurements. The clock at Vie Abbey was primarily an astronomical clock, seated beneath a vast astrolabe. It was very well able to mark the changing of the seasons, the orbits of sun and moon, and the passage of the planets-but it was not accurate for ordinary, civil time beyond an hour. There were no minute or second hands on the clock at Vie Abbey. So the army of mechanics who tuned the clocks, and who lost time as they traveled from church to office to market, were forced to make their best guesses as to precisely what time it was.
All of this yielded a strange wave of clock chimes throughout the city. The four-o’clock-hour, which is the hour that found Beckett on his way back to Raithower House, began with the heavy bronze thunder at Vie Abbey. Shortly after it began, the clocks nearby, with their orchestra of bells, took up the tolling, and passed it along to those clocks that were nearest to them, and so forth. The entire process, including the strange pockets of early chiming, the clocks that were hopelessly delayed, and the clocks that seemed to be under the misapprehension that it was actually eight o’clock in the evening, took well over twenty minutes, even for as modest an hour as four o’clock. During Second Winter, when the clock-tuners were much less able to effectively tend to their charges, the noon bells were sometimes known to toll for the entire hour until they began again at one.
Beckett reached Old Bank just as that neighborhood’s venerable clocks began to take up the clanging of the hour. He passed without delay through one of the many checkpoints he’d insisted on; local gendarmes, accompanied by a therian sniffer, searched passers-by for explosives on the chance that Anonymous John might take it into his mind that he should attempt some kind of reprisal. The therians, peculiarly, were unusually sensitive to the presence of the oneiric regeants used in heretical munitions. They were employed much the same way dogs were-a fact that Beckett found more than a little disgusting, but he was willing to accept it if it meant putting a stop to the attacks.
Old Bank was replete with such checkpoints, all the way into the tangled Arcadium beneath it, and it was beyond consideration that anyone might attack Raithower House with an oneiric weapon. Beckett remained fairly comfortable, then, as he walked towards the Raithower courtyard. A tall, rangy-man in a long dark coat preceded him to the gates-another early-riser, perhaps. Beckett called out to him, but his voice was drowned out by Old Bank’s clocks. The noisiest of these clocks, which had just begun to toll at Beckett’s arrival, was called Goursehead Clock; it rang four brass clangs, of varying pitch and tone, for every one great iron bong that tolled the hour.
The man entered Raithower House. Shortly thereafter, the building exploded.
The sound and force of the blast were muffled by the old stone walls of Raithower House itself, so the wave of pressure and heat presented Beckett with only a moment of pain and confusion. It gave way to the old coroner furiously berating himself as he saw blue-white light boil out of the windows, and turn almost immediately to the red and orange of burning wood.
Fifty men looking for oneiric munitions, Beckett thought, And not one checking for regular, old-fashioned phlogiston bombs. The wave of chiming clocks passed by, to the sound of men shouting for help, the crackling roar of the fire, and the jangling clatter of the fire brigades.