There was comfort in the knowledge that Skinner was back with him. Beckett picked his way around the debris in the doorway of the blasted-out gendarmerie headquarters, and drew his revolver. The revolver was also comforting; a good, solid weight in his hand. He’d been carrying the weapon for so long it was practically an antique. He flexed his free hand, wincing as his knuckles popped, and stepped inside.
The lights had been the first things to break when the bomb had gone off. There was a little daylight that had found its way in from cracked walls and deep crevices, light already weakened from the struggle to break Trowth’s omnipresent cover of fog and pollution. The gloom inside was thick and almost palpable, barely disrupted by the narrow shafts of pale sun.
“Can you see anything?” Beckett whispered to Gorud.
The therian snorted. “No. Am not a cat,” he muttered. There was a faint rustling, and the hall was suddenly awash in blue light, as the simian creature produced a small phlogiston lantern. Gorud narrowed the beam, slightly, shining it on the black stone and charred wood that littered the floor, letting it play about the walls.
They were in a relatively large receiving room; its function in a slaughterhouse was obscure to Beckett, but as offices for the gendarmerie, its purpose was relatively clear. There was an upturned desk, splintered and broken in half, where the citizenry might have come if they had a complaint, or to make a report. There were overturned benches where people could wait, torn scraps of paper fluttering in a faint breeze, the remnants of broadsheets that had served as entertainment in idle minutes.
There were bodies scattered across the floor. Half a dozen at least, and most twisted and sprawled away from the center of the room. Beckett surmised that they had died in the initial blast, dying mercifully as a result of physical trauma, instead of the unbearably painful psychic damage of the munition. The throbbing pulse of freed-up psychic energy beat around them; surfaces, even under the dim glow of Gorud’s lamp, took on peculiar textures and characteristics, impressing colors into Beckett’s mind. Stone suggested it might be sticky to the touch, wood seemed like paper, about to be snatched away by an unseen hand. The floor…the floor was wet, damp, brackish water over dark brass…
Skinner rapped on the floor at his feet. Five. Beckett sighed with relief as he realized that the coding of her telerhythmia was perfectly clear to him-as easy to understand as any conversation. He had not been losing his mind; the new knocker really just was unintelligible. She relayed the positions of the men still in the building. Two on his level, three more on the floor above. This was a small blessing; at least the three men on the second floor would be unlikely to escape.
“What is it?” Gorud asked him, his voice pitched low.
“She’s telling me where the targets are. Two down here. You have a weapon?”
Gorud made a sound like a cough. “No. We are not permitted.”
Stupid. Why would you let someone join the Coroners, and not give them a gun? “If things get tight, stay back, keep the light on them.” Becektt considered just how helpful the creature would be in a fight. Moving on all fours, he was about as high as Beckett’s waist. It was hard to be sure beneath the heavy coat and thick fur, but the coroner suspected that Gorud’s frame was replete with strong, rangy muscle. Still…unarmed, against a strong man? “Run if I tell you to. Understand?”
The therian made that same coughing sound. “Yes.”
Beckett nodded towards a yawning black doorway at the far end of the room. Gorud moved towards it, one hand holding the lantern aloft, the other on the ground, helping him move. Beckett followed close behind, gun ready. Skinner rapped softly at his side, letting him know how close they were. Three raps, spaced evenly, represented his distance. The faster they came, the closer the target was. It was an unnerving process; the rapid taps could make anyone tense.
Three taps, very close together, and Beckett knew they were practically on top of the man. He could just faintly here the madman’s muttered glossolalia.
“There,” Gorud whispered, and shone a light down a narrow hallway. It fell on a shadow in the shape of a man, white eyes glittering in the dark. The man looked up at Beckett and screeched, pronouncing syllables in a language the old coroner had never heard, if it was a language at all and not just the meaningless gibbering that all lunatics held in common.
Beckett’s weapon kicked, hard, as he put a bullet between the madman’s eyes. The man fell back as though his feet had been kicked from under him, and hit the ground as still as stone. Easy. This is easy. This will be easy. “One more on this floor,” Beckett told the therian. “Then we need to find the stairs.”
They found the second man in an adjoining room. He was huddled in the corner, the body of another man sprawled out in front of him. There was something black and sticky about his mouth; it was impossible to tell the color in the blue lamp-light, but Beckett had a fairly good idea of what it was.
The man just looked at them as they entered, and whispered to himself. “…she didn’t know she was me, if she’d known she’d have been, she’d have been, she knew, she’d have been somewhere. Somewhere else if she was. Somewhere-”
Beckett shot him in the face; he twitched, and lay still. While he waited for the spots that the muzzle-flash had left to clear from his good eye, the coroner took the opportunity to open his revolver and dump out the two spent shells. He reloaded and snapped the weapon closed. “Come on,” he told the therian. “Upstairs.”
There was a sudden rap at his side, an irritated quadruple-rhythm on the wall-the telerhythmic equivalent of a curse. “Skinner. What is it?”
She tried to tap something back to him, but there was now a second phantom rhythm on the wall, a garbled mess of long and short sounds, that made communication impossible. Shit, he thought to himself. “Whoever else is listening, be quiet. I can’t understand what you’re saying.” There was a pause, and he heard Skinner’s rapping again. He had time to make out a word, “Trouble,” and then the second knocking returned, louder this time, loud enough that Beckett was worried it would be overheard.
“Be quiet,” he insisted. “You are drawing attention. I need you quiet,” he spat through gritted teeth. After a moment, Skinner’s telerhythmia vanished, and Beckett was left with the new knocker, who softened his voice, but could make himself no better understood. “James, I know that’s you. I need you to get me Skinner. I can’t read you. Do you understand me? I can’t tell what you’re saying. Let Skinner talk to me.”
Silence, for a moment, and then James’ garbled knocking stubbornly returned. Beckett turned to the therian. “Can you understand this?” Gorud silently shook his head. “Crap.” The old coroner adjusted his coat. “Crap. Crap. Crap.” The veneine high was beginning to fade; the warm blanket that protected Beckett from the pain in his joints and the aches in his muscles was beginning to unravel. A sharp spike drilled into his knee. “Upstairs,” he whispered.
The path upstairs was by a narrow stairway at the far end of the hall. The steps were wooden-old and nearly rotten, and the creaked and crackled as Beckett climbed them. The therian followed, his long arms and prehensile feet giving him confidence in the face of the structure’s potentially catastrophic failure.
The muttering of damaged minds was just audible when they reached the second floor, spilling down the cramped, claustrophobic hallway, from any one of a number of rooms with crooked, broken doors. James’ knocking along the walls was no help; he used some means, unfamiliar to Beckett, to describe distance and direction. It didn’t sound like speed or volume, and the coroner found himself disinclined to take the time to puzzle it out.
“James,” he spat through clenched teeth. “I can’t understand you. Just shut up.” The knocking continued for a moment, then stopped. Beckett sighed, then winced as a myriad of tiny sharp pains in his neck and shoulders saw their way clear through the drugs. He held his hand out to Gorud, indicating that the therian should hold back, then eased forward towards the first door. There were scattered, huddled shapes. None of them moved. The mad chattering was weirdly delocalized up here; no matter where he seemed to move, its volume and distance seemed to persist-as though those gabbling voices were not real sounds at all, but some alien part of his subconscious that had suddenly been given voice.
Beckett shook off the feeling, and carefully moved to the next room. This one, too, was empty. The third room…nothing moved in the third room. There were no huddled shapes, only one man on the far wall, who hung limply from where he’d pinned his left arm into the mortar with a short sword. Blood colored the length of the limb and most of his torso, and continued to expand in a smooth-edged circle away from his feet. A weird, puissant rainbow of half-formed, effervesced dreams flickered in a halo around the body.
There was no sure way to tell how long ago the man had died. Was he one of the three that Skinner had spotted upstairs, one that had finally succumbed to the self-destructive ravings that the oneiric weapon could draw out? Better to assume that there were still three left to go. He shook his head and moved on.
As the veneine faded, so did Beckett’s protection against the existential misery that lurked in his soul. Another dark hallway, another dangerously-disturbed man. Another threat, another monster. Navigating black, dangerous corridors, all while his body rotted out from beneath him, this had been his life for as long as he could remember anymore. And it would be his life until the fades finally claimed something irreplaceable-once they reached his heart, or lungs, or liver-he would die on his feet, pointlessly hunting some foul heresy. And when he was gone, men would continue; continue to threaten the safety of the Empire, continue to make monsters of themselves. The gloom shivered in his mind, strengthened by the reverberations of the oneiric weapon.
The fourth room was empty, too, just piles of broken furniture. Gorud shone his lantern across it, while Beckett gave it a cursory glance. The muscles in his gun hand throbbed fiercely now, and quivered in a way that presaged a cramp. Empty, he thought. No, wait. Beckett gestured to the therian, and pointed towards a far corner, towards an overturned table.
There was something…something moving there. He could see it, or he thought he could see it, through his blind eye. A flickering silhouette, a shape..a man drew himself up from his crouch behind the mislaid furniture. Blood caked his mouth and his hands twitched and writhed abominably, as though his fingers were struggling to violently detach themselves from their parent limbs. He chewed at his arms and shoulders, compulsively, like a dog trying to get at flees.
His mouth was a strange flower, an even circle of luminescent white teeth, long and curved like fishing hooks, like the petals of a lotus, they whirled and pulsed as he worked at his arms, cleaving meat and flesh away, freeing the strangeness within to the charged air that would give it shape and substance, congeal it from the imaginary to wickedly real…
No. No, Beckett thought. That’s wrong. His mouth was an ordinary mouth. A human mouth, with human teeth and bloody lips. He stared up with glittering white eyes and shuffled past a body on the floor Beckett saw now was still twitching. Was he one of the live ones? Is this two, or just one? Three?
“Mr. Beckett?” Gorud whispered. “Mr. Beckett!”
The man leapt forward, and Beckett screamed as a hideous, shrieking, twisting pain coiled through his arm. The agony brought him to his knees and caused the muscles in his fingers to clench-the gun went off, but the bullet went wild, tearing a chunk of stone and plaster from a far wall. His hand knotted into a fist, Beckett found he couldn’t release the trigger to fire again, couldn’t even let go of the gun…
Teeth gnashing the madman fell on him, frenetic fingers clutching, as he tried to secure a grip, tried to bite a chunk out of Beckett’s face. The coroner tucked his chin down, tried to keep his head low, as he struggled to tear the gun free from his frozen hand.
Gorud sprang forward then, leaving the lantern on the ground as he snatched at one of the madman’s arms. Using momentum to make up for his lack of mass, the therian managed to spin the human around and off of Beckett, then, still holding tight, dropped low and curled up, sending the dream-poisoned gendarme rolling over his back and into the darkness. The man crashed painfully to the ground, but was on his feet again in a second. Gorud howled, great teeth bare, prepared to bite.
Beckett held his clenched hand up and fanned the hammer of his Feathersmith with his good left hand. The gunshots were miniature explosions, again and again as the massive revolver punched holes in the stranger’s body, sending him staggering into the far wall. He opened his mouth and stretched it wide; for a moment, Beckett thought he saw that strange, toothy flower of a mouth again, before it was obscured by the colored spots left behind by the Feathersmith’s muzzle flash.
There was silence, then, broken by James’ sudden, furious spectral knocking. “All right?” Gorud asked him, over the noisy rattling.
“I can’t…can’t let go of the gun,” Beckett grunted, the pain in his arm brought tears to his eyes. “I can’t…” With one last heroic effort, he managed to lever the revolver from his right hand. The freed fingers immediately closed up, thought the pain remained. Panic surfaced too, as the sense that the muscles in his hand had been twisted around each other violated his body’s sense of integrity. “Damn it, James!” Beckett shouted. “I can’t understand you!”
The rapping continued, seeming to take on a panicked, hysterical edge to it. An alarm? A warning?
Gorud heard it, too. “Someone’s coming.”
“No,” Beckett said, a sudden realization dawning. “Someone’s getting out.” He groaned and lurched to his feet. “Shit. Come on.”
Gorud quickly grabbed the lantern, its light swinging nauseatingly across the walls, the hallway seeming to roll back and forth like the deck of a ship. The ground pitched wildly, and Beckett gripped his oar tightly, falling to his knees on the deck of the longboat. Up ahead, far, too far ahead, Fletcher’s cigar pulsed dim and red in the dark. He turned to look at Beckett, thorny green vines crawling from the black holes where his eyes were, and then his whole shape dissolved into a pale nimbus of light, revealing another man. A stranger, stumbling down the stairs at the end of the hall, trailing a thick smear of black blood and an aura of half-formed dream images-smiling faces, women with sultry eyes, spiders with long, snaking tales and hands with fingertips made of ice.
Beckett fired, left-handed, missed. He fired again, and the hammer clicked on an empty chamber. “Damn it!” He ran after the man, outpacing Gorud, whose lantern cast the coroner’s shadow ahead of them. It doesn’t matter, I know where he’s going, Beckett thought has he plunged into the dark, opening his revolver and stuffing it into the crook of his right arm while he fumbled with the bullets in his pocket, trying to reload. The old coroner crashed down the stairs, nearly falling, tumbling into the open receiving area, in time to see the poisoned man flee into the fading afternoon light that had crept in through the building’s devastated entryway.
“No, no,” Beckett muttered, “Come on.” He tried to press a last bullet into its chamber, but dislodged the revolver. It fell to the ground with a clank, and scattered its ammunition across the floor, bullets vanishing into the scattering of shadows. “No!” He dropped to his knees, gasping as he felt the joint in his right leg explode, trying to ignoring the screaming pain as he searched for a bullet, just one bullet to load into the weapon. Something, anything. Gorud appeared beside him, nimble fingers playing across the debris-littered floor.
Driven by the violent, churning engine of fever-dreams that had grown in his heart, exploding outwards as radiation from the oneiric explosion had corroded the delicate partitions of his mind, the raving gendarme ran. The light burned at his eyes, but he pushed himself towards it as new, strange senses that itched about his skin told him of other minds and other pairs of eyes, and the new, blooming, degenerate and venomous lust drew him on, demanded that he vomit his stomach of poison and bile into their minds, to free them from the husks of rotting flesh into which they had suffered the misfortune of being born. He fled into the afternoon light, and looked out upon the looking eyes that saw him.
The thunder of gunfire stopped him short, and he didn’t bother to look down as he felt his dreams bleed free of his wounds. He felt his body dissolve into meat and filth, and the new strange minds inside his mind wondered if the world would still be there when he left it.