Mr. Stitch Read Online Free Page B

heard his breath catch. “Oh. Emilia Vie-Gorgon.” Even a ten year old knew the Vie-Gorgon name. The Vie-Gorgons were one of the most famous of the Esteemed Families of Trowth; their legendary feud with the Gorgon-Vies was one of the defining elements not just of politics, but of the Architecture War, of culture and entertainment, of virtually every aspect of the Empire. The Vie-Gorgon family was second from the Imperial Throne, and Emilia Vie-Gorgon’s brother was next in line to be Emperor. An invitation from her—an invitation to someone like Skinner—was like…well, it wasn’t like anything. Nothing like this had ever happened before. The Families didn’t associate with the commoners unless they had to, and even then it was only appropriate for the least relevant members—fourth or fifth sons, like Valentine, or else secondary or tertiary cousins. Emilia Vie-Gorgon…if Trowth had a princess, Emilia Vie-Gorgon would be it.
    “It don’t say,” said Roger, “if you want to accept or not. Shouldn’t it say that?”
    Emilia Vie-Gorgon probably didn’t consider that someone might want to turn her down. “I wouldn’t worry about it, Roger. Tell me, do you know what’s on the playbill at the Royal tonight?”

Three
     
     
     
    Beckett sat at his desk and stared. It was piled high with papers—with the reports that he’d been demanding. Arrest reports, biographies, kirliotypes. Pictures of crime scenes, spattered with blood, pulsing with strange auras. Stacks of clippings from the broadsheets, relating tales that ranged from the mundane (“Abundance of Rats in Red Lane Gutters”) to the unpleasant (“Third Severed Hand Found in Mudside”) to the purely outlandish (“Gendarmes Replaced With Ectoplasmic Dopplegangers: Who Can We Trust?”). There were reports of looted crypts, hospitals that had been robbed, men that had been found bleeding dreams into the streets, or wandering about with scaly arms grafted to their bodies. There were lists of men in custody, trolljrmen who’d unwisely practiced their chimerstry away from the secrecy of their hospitals, of indige geometers who’d been brought in for engaging in heretically hyper-spatial mathematics, human men rounded up from the duetti clubs where they’d been purposefully over-dosing on veneine…
    Beckett scratched at the itch by his eye, and leaned back in his chair. His forearm throbbed a little from where he’d injected himself, but mostly the veneine left him feeling detached, floating. His left eye, despite its blindness, detected no small number of thin, writhing black shapes that wriggled across the walls of his office, but Beckett did not find himself concerned. Nor did he find himself concerned by the damp stains on his walls, or the shallow puddle of water by his feet. The warmth and peace of the veneine high would last only a little longer, and the old coroner was determined to enjoy it wall it lasted.
    Soon enough, the cold and anxiety began to creep back in. Distant aches in his knees and back began to sharpen, the numbness in his face and fingers demanded more of his attention. The water dried up, though the wriggling black eels remained, making it difficult to concentrate on his papers. The Committee on Moral Responsibility had forced him to fire Karine, his indige secretary. The new man they’d found—a timid, shell-shocked young man who’d worked primarily with the quartermasters during the war—was purely incapable of distinguishing useful information from dross, so Beckett found himself obliged to wade through the mess himself.
    The papers seemed unlikely to yield up their secrets any time soon. In the last few months, the sheer amount of information to come across Beckett’s desk had increased exponentially. Heretical science was spreading through the city like a disease, cropping up left and right, everywhere from dingy public houses in the Arcadium to the fancy homes of New Bank. There was no clear point of origin, no