While William II Gorgon-Vie ended the print industry in Trowth, Elijah Beckett stood in Starkton eating smoked fish. The fish were wrapped in the last issue that would ever be printed of the White Star, and had Beckett realized the rarity and potential value in such a document, it is unlikely he would have behaved any differently. He still would have permitted the pages to absorb the salty brine from the herring and saltire fish, still let it soak through with Trowth’s famous brown sauce, which had once been a ubiquitous condiment for smoked fish. Beckett would have still let soggy bits of paper fall to the ground, to be washed away by the driving rain.
Beckett ate his fish without tasting it, even though he’d tromped six blocks to find a fish vendor that still served smoked fish with brown sauce. In the last few years, nearly every fishmonger had begun dishing up their vittels covered in Corsay pepper sauce or with pickled fruits, leaving the venerable tradition of the brown sauce-a fluid concoction whose recipe was known only to a small handful of men who dealt in the dressing-far by the wayside. Beckett had not given more than a few seconds’ thought to the subject until this day, when he added it to the long list of things that had changed in his city for the worse. This is not to say that he dwelt on the subject with any gravity, but simply that it occupied some small part of his mind that concerned itself with whether or not the next generation of Trowthi citizens would be able to avail themselves of brown sauce.
The better part of Beckett’s mind was occupied with the ships that his men had seized at the docks in Starkton. The neighborhood-near the very southernmost bend of the Stark, where it finally began to empty out into the icy bay-had long been an occupied territory of the Gorgon-Vies in the Architecture War, and so was dominated by their signature squat, ugly buildings. Hardly anyone ever complained, as the district was comprised predominately of warehouses, shipping agencies, customs houses, and a myriad other government, institutional, and purely functionary buildings for which architecture served no purpose but utility, and which were generally expected to be squat, square, and ugly anyway.
At the edge of the river, where the mouldering wooden docks jutted out into the dark water, three steam-powered river barges idled. Their engines had been shut down, leaving a mist of spent phlogiston swirling over the swift current of the Stark and smelling like copper and blood. Their crews had all been taken into custody, arrested and held without charge or warrant, while the holds of the ships were searched. They loomed in the gloomy morning light, while gendarmes with flickering blue lamps scoured the ships’ decks and excavated their bowels. Meanwhile, Beckett watched, and ate his fish.
Stevedores were dragged off by the score and taken to cells beneath Old Bank where they shivered in the damp and cold. The captains and owner of the three barges were being held in Beckett’s de facto headquarters, a former barracks for the War Ministry’s pressgang, disused since the end of the Ettercap War. Beckett would have his own men question the ship’s captains, or would question them himself, but later. At the moment, the veneine and djang buzzing through his system made it difficult for him to focus; he found his mind flitting from subject to subject, utterly disinterested in even the most mild exercises in concentration.
One of Beckett’s conscripted gendarmes approached him; the man had a large moustache and a crooked nose, and the number four branded onto his face. This man, whose name Beckett could not remember (he’d been referring to the man as “Four”), had become Beckett’s unofficial liaison to the gendarmerie, pretending some past acquaintance with the Inspector that Beckett also could not recall.
“Well?” Beckett asked, licking brown sauce from the numb tips of his fingers.
Four shook his head. “A few bits of contraband, but nothing unusual for ships this size. Mostly just hiding wool for the northern principalities from the Imperial excises. Nothing…uh. Nothing like what you’re looking for.”
Beckett grimaced, and tossed the remains of his breakfast away. His blind eye had begun weeping, recently, shedding tears of vitreous humor tinged bloody and red as the fades began to eat away at his tear ducts. The ruddy tears, shielded from the rain by the prominent overhang of his leather hat, drew a dark channel along his cheek, but he did not notice them. Most of his face was numbed by the disease; the rest was numbed by the drugs in his system. He could still feel a throb in the crook of his left elbow, the site of his last injection. He’d had to switch arms, since there were too many spots on his right forearm that appeared in danger of sepsis.
“No explosives,” Four went on, while a sound like the buzzing of angry hornets kicked up behind him. It was the sound of musketballs whizzing by, but he did not move for cover, nor did he even appear to notice them. “No oneiric munitions, no anything. Not with these.”
Beckett heard the shouts of men struck down as they tried to climb the hill below Kaarcag and saw the weaponized, sentient foglets swirling around his feet. These were the first sign that the assault was a trap, that the Dragon Princes were prepared. They would crawl up a soldier’s leg and down his throat, trying to drain his blood out through his lungs.
Elijah Beckett shook his head. No assault. This was a raid. And the Dragon Princes were gone, he was looking for Anonymous John. This must be a hallucination. “We’ll keep looking,” Beckett said. Two gendarmes had come down the hill (Off of the barge, Beckett told himself), Gorud trailing behind them. The therian seemed, as usual, unmoved by the concerns of the humans around him, content to follow his orders and perhaps secretly marvel at man’s strangeness.
“What should we do with the boats?” Four asked.
“Just,” the old coroner began. Men began to file off the barges in twos and fours, brushing past Beckett and the gendarme captain. “Just hold them. For now.”
“The goods on them, though-”
“Can fucking wait. I don’t want to have to sort through this crap again when it turns up at the wholesalers down river. Hold the boats until we’re done.”
“Yes, sir,” said Four, as he turned to shout the order back to his men.
A gust of wind whipped at Beckett’s long coat, and he shoved his hands into his pockets, where he discovered, much to his surprise, a small scrap of paper. Mindful that this was probably a hallucination as well, Beckett did not at first draw it out, but instead listened to the wind, the gendarmes shouting, the distant sound of rifle and cannon that echoed from his past. When the paper refused to relinquish its solidity, he drew it out and read it, but was still unconvinced that it was real.
“Gorud,” he called to the therian. The ape-man obediently loped closer. “Gorud. Do you read?”
The therian shrugged beneath his ill-fitting coat. Rain had plastered his fur to the side of his head. “My people are not adept at this. I have some sufficiency at it.”
Beckett handed him the paper. “What does this say?”
“Truce,” Gorud read. “Two days. Hardwicke’s, nine o’clock. John.”
The old coroner snapped his head around with alarming ferocity. The note, had the note been in his pocket in the morning? Before the raid? He couldn’t remember, but he was sure he would have noticed. Someone must have slipped it into his coat just now, which meant one of the men, the gendarmes. One of them was a spy for Anonymous John.
The men that had brushed passed him on the docks had all separated, gone off towards their homes or back to the barracks, and even so, there was nothing remarkable about any of them. Ordinary looking men, with the ordinary compliment of eyes and noses, scars and moustaches, garbed appropriately. How long had the note even been in his pocket? Had there been someone earlier, a stranger on the street? Someone at the fish vendor’s? Had Anonymous John snuck into Beckett’s house and left it in his coat the night before?
It didn’t matter now; if there had been an opportunity to snag Anonymous John, it was certainly long gone. Beckett turned the paper over in his hand, and smiled grimly. If John wanted a truce, it could only mean one thing: Elijah Beckett was winning.