Beneath Ceaseless Skies #213 Read online

  “Not today,” says Latch, stepping into the apartment. He can smell fresh bleach. “Not to you.”

  Carver, reading Latch’s eyes, drops the bowl and takes a step back. “You’ve got nothing on me! I’m a free man.”

  A Justice’s sword isn’t like other swords. It looks like other swords—a hand-and-a-half hilt, spherical pommel, short quillons worked into the two pans of a balance scale, a long blade with a narrow fuller—but possesses important differences: a narrow slot cut out of the blade’s last thirty centimeters, to catch an opponent’s sword; the blade thicker and heavier than is common; no point, and all its edges are rounded off. These design principles suggest that justice disarms, that justice is not to be swung lightly, and that justice is a blunt yet considerate force. Practically speaking, this tells the wielding Justice that bruises and broken bones are not a choice.

  “I was cleared of all...”

  When Latch swings his sword into Carver’s jaw, the wet crunch of it drops the man to the floor. Blood spatters on the wall. The man gurgles and moans, hauling himself across the room, leaving more blood smeared in a slick trail. Stepping around the counter, Latch presses the end of the blade against the back of Carver’s head. The man whimpers.

  It might not be justice, but it feels right.

  * * *

  Thursday.

  “It’s downstairs, Latch.”

  Latch examined a clockwork frog, spring legs articulated, a diamond key hole on its back for winding. Overnight, Sergeant Elles had enlisted a handful of her fellow watchmen and found Mr. Tock’s toyshop. It had been locked and shuttered. They’d busted down the door and searched it. Abandoned, but far from empty.

  “It?” he asked, replacing the frog on a glass shelf bracketed to the wall, in a frog-shaped hole in the thick layer of dust. The room was dominated by cabinets and display benches, all packed with silver and bronze toys, finely tooled, impeccably worked. Miniscule horses and tigers and swans and dogs stared at him though grimy cataracts. “Sounds ominous.”

  Elles beckoned from an open trapdoor nestled in a corner. “Like you wouldn’t believe.”

  Beneath the shop, Latch had to fight his way through a forest of dangling limbs. Hundreds of wooden arms and legs hung from the ceiling, fingers and toes low enough to brush Latch’s face as he pried his way through like some jungle explorer, all reaching out, grasping for him. Hints of solvent and cedar. Against the wall, beastly maquettes reared in the shadows, their rough, hastily sculpted forms freezing them between inanimate clay and his throat. At the far end of the room, Elles stood with a light—a standard-issue induction lamp, its wound-up charge fading.

  On a wooden desk sat a clock. Latch had seen such clocks before, built without a case, the intricacies of their function proudly exposed. Skeleton clocks. In front of this clock, strapped onto a metal chair, was half a man—the left half—focused on the time, dried blood in a pool around him. The clock was ticking softly.

  Latch squatted beside the dead man. The flat, cut side of him had been capped in steel and covered with an intaglio of dense script. 1. Wash the bones in a solution of... “What are we looking at, Elles?”

  She blinked, gave her lamp a few cranks. The light bloomed a fraction. “Like I’d know.”

  “Okay.” Latch kept reading the instructions, made it through to 6. before deciding there were things he didn’t need to know. The diagrams under the instruction were particularly perfect to forget. Carefully, he stepped over the blood and regarded the clock. “But what does it look like to you?”

  “Looks like half a dead guy in front of a clock made from the other half of him!”

  The clock’s face plate had been taken from the skull or a flatter section of the hip, the numeric hours and minute lines burnt on; thinly braided hair, coated in resin, for its three hands. The movement’s wheels punched out of the shoulder blade, each with six narrow spokes of shaved down fingers and toes and ribs, every curve straightened by rasp, lathe, chisel, and sandpaper. Filed teeth formed the serrated grooves of the escapement. Driving this was a large balance wheel of thinly cross-sectioned vertebrae, its oscillating rotation turning the reconstituted spine into an ouroboros. This was regulated by a balance spring of tightly spiraled tendons. Stamped on every single part: an articulated dummy holding a cog.

  “Do we have a name for the victim?”

  “‘Unfortunate’.”

  Latch stood. “Anything more helpful?”

  “Not yet.” Elles stepped closer and held the lamp towards the clock. The shadows crept over the man’s body. Footsteps in the shop above caused the hanging arms and legs to sway and clonk together. “I’ve got people on it.”

  “He left instructions.”

  “Mr. Tock?”

  Latch nodded. “As though this was a kit model. Something you can do at home with numbered parts and their numbered steps.”

  Elles bent forward, painting new shadows onto the clock, splashing strange, distended silhouettes on the wall behind it. The clock, the body, Latch, and Elles fused in a single, black impression. “With numbered parts and their numbered steps... and half a body.”

  “And half a body.”

  “Wouldn’t want to see what he’d make of the bloody magistrates.”

  The light moved over the individual parts. Latch frowned. The time was correct. Set and left to tick in the darkness beneath a toyshop. He couldn’t shake the feeling that something was looking over his shoulder, watching him, setting another clock to his movements, adding a minute here, a second there, adjusting the pendulum while he ran about the city. Like a fifth figure in their silhouette.

  “So, what does it actually look like?” he asked.

  Elles sucked her teeth. “Like the mess we were told not to find.”

  * * *

  Wednesday.

  “We don’t need anything more than a cursory investigation with the semblance of diligence, Justice.”

  The chambers of Magistrate Gelb were a pretty solid reflection of who the man thought he was. It was green leather chairs and mahogany shelves, a desk the size and weight of a small elephant, and polished hardwood floorboards softened by pelts. It was a third-floor view from the eastside courthouse, overlooking the river. It was dark, heavy, infused with sandalwood and peated whiskey. It was trying too hard to be somebody with power.

  Standing before the magistrate’s desk, Latch picked a spot through the window and stared. “I think, sir, that I...”

  The magistrate sat forward. “Resist the temptation, Justice. Just do your job.”

  Latch kept his expression blank. “I serve justice in all things, sir.”

  “Incorrect,” snapped Gelb. His desk was meticulously ordered: a stack of papers aligned beside two tomes of precedent; decanter of red wine in one corner, a set of scales in the other; and an ornate letter opener. Arrayed beneath all that, carved into the wood itself, stretched a map of the city. “You serve me. Your access to justice is mediated by my remit. You would do well to remember that, as far as you are concerned, I am justice.”

  Standing with her back to the chamber’s door, Sergeant Elles cleared her throat. “Sir, I don’t think that you can blame the Justice for what happened yesterday.”

  “When I ask for your opinion, Sergeant, remind me to schedule a lobotomy.” The magistrate stared at Latch. “If it wasn’t for the current situation, Justice, I’d be considering your execution, over that Carver business,. Not how the system works. Messy. Very messy. As it stands, however, expediency must overcome propriety.”

  Latch blinked. “You were saying something about semblance, sir?”

  “Indeed.” The magistrate lifted the top page from his stack of notes and placed it on the desk. “As you’ve no doubt heard, the south-eastern Watch Station was the target of a... criminal action. The city’s current difficulties with the Unionists could easily see this regrettable incident become the catalyst for an untenable situation. The Governor’s Seat desires, in all things, a harmonious existence
for its citizens, and a certain alacrity in the exteriority of the law.”

  Elles snorted. “In other words, they don’t want to hear about bombings and how they might have fucking happened?”

  Latch stared out the window a little harder.

  Magistrate Gelb leant back in his chair and crossed his arms. “The sergeant is as succinct as ever. Unofficially, your investigation is to find no further evidence of continuing criminal activity. If it suggests the Unionists were involved, they will be dealt with accordingly. If it suggests the involvement of another party, the Unionists will be dealt with accordingly. There will be no loose ends. There will be no surprises. You will remain firmly sealed in the narrow confines of this envelope. Do I make myself clear?”

  Clearly, politics was involved, and Magistrate Gelb was nothing if not a politician. Magistrates, their appointments dispensed by the aristocratic assemblies of the Governor’s Seat, were, by nature, equal parts unassumingly cunning and viciously accommodating. It wasn’t a matter of bending laws, reconsidering statutes, or ignoring precedent. In the end, it was about instrumentality.

  Latch nodded slowly. “The semblance of diligence, sir.”

  “Sergeant?”

  “No messes and don’t fuck it up,” said Elles.

  Gelb smiled tightly. “I could not have put it any better myself.”

  * * *

  Monday.

  When Latch opens the door, the officers from the Watch look at him grimly. The Carver apartment is splashed with blood, handprints smeared across the walls and on the countertop in the kitchen, drops in a snaking path around the floor. Two feet stick out around the counter. More blood. People mill in the hallways, voices hushed. Two of the officers are taking notes, walking gingerly through the apartment while they scribble. Three others stand in a loose triangle in front of Carver. The man is sitting, staring through them. He, like the apartment, is covered in blood. None of it his.

  “She came at me with a knife,” he says, voice oddly monotone. Like he is reading the words for the first time. Like he’s heard other people say them before and he is trying them out. “There was nothing I could do. She was crazy. It happened so fast.”

  Latch walks across the room and around the counter. One of the note-takers, a young woman, fresh, is leaning over the body of Carver’s sister, peering at what’s left of her face. It doesn’t take her long.

  She looks up. “Justice? Didn’t know you’d been called in.”

  Latch waves this off. “I live here. A few floors up.”

  “Oh.” She looks back at the body, scratching her head with a pencil. Uncomfortable with the silence death emits. “Did you know her, sir?”

  “We met. Sort of,” says Latch, squatting. She’s on her back, arms and legs splayed, shirt and trousers creased, torn. Blood like a halo around her head. A kitchen knife beside her left hand. Unbloodied. Two bloodied silver candlesticks, on their sides, to either side of her shoulders. Extended jets of spatter. “Once.”

  “Oh.”

  “She was screaming,” says Carver, still rehearsing his lines. The watchmen around him nod along. They know the script, too. Who didn’t in this city? “I don’t know what happened. I was scared. I just grabbed whatever I could and...”

  The young officer sighs. “Seems pretty straightforward.”

  “Why use two candlesticks, then?” asks Latch, almost to himself, gauging how gone the world really is, if it’s just him that’s crazy.

  “Sir?”

  There are dents in the floorboards around her head. There’s no blood on her knife. There’s nothing under her fingernails. Latch stands and traces the drops, the footprints.

  “I’m in the kitchen and my sister grabs a knife,” he says, throat taut like he’s shouting. “She’s screaming. I back away, trying to calm her down, out of the kitchen, into the lounge room. She’s waving the knife around, stabbing the air. I back into the mantel and reach for something. Anything. A hand closing around the candlestick, I swing. She goes down.”

  “Sounds about right.” The young officer writes as Latch speaks, nodding along. “We see it all the time.”

  Latch blinks away the scene where Carver is waiting in the kitchen with a candlestick for his sister to come home. Smashes her in the face. Follows her around the apartment as she staggers, confused, terrified, screaming. When she gets to the kitchen, he knocks her to the floor. Straddling her, he lifts the candlestick and brings it down. He repeats this, sometimes finding face, sometimes finding floor, again and again until the blood makes it slippery. He stands, gets the second candlestick, and starts again.

  “Then why all the blood on the walls, the floor?” asks Latch. “Why is she in the kitchen? Why two candlesticks?”

  “Are you saying he murdered her, sir? Sir?”

  Carver is crying, the watchmen shaking their heads sadly, consolatory hands patting the man’s shoulders. It feels like fever dream. Outside, the neighbors slowly return to their homes. Like Latch, they know what happened, and the separation between what they’ve seen and what’ll be claimed is a jagged crevasse. They stand on one side, the other side seems far away, and the question of what happens when you leap across that bottomless gap is too hard to contemplate. Contained in this apartment, what happened has nothing to do with them, is not their problem, doesn’t touch their day beyond the transmission of a story to their tea merchant and their butcher.

  “Probably not.” Latch heads for the door. He can’t be here, can’t listen to Carver anymore, can’t stand to see their brand of justice play out. “Don’t you know a good Justice is deaf, blind, and dumb?”

  * * *

  Friday.

  Every day, hundreds of boats congregated on the calm waters of the River Ith and roped themselves together to form the Floating Market. Rafts built a patchwork quilt of courtyards and walkways, barges linked in loud lines of fruit and vegetables, and swarms of coracles, sloops, barques, tugs, and dinghies tied one deck to the next, selling everything from bronzeware to boiled sweets. At the end of the day, the boats dispersed and the river was given back to reflections of rippling moonlight. And somewhere between this routine, Mr. Tock had had another bout of creativity.

  “Are we sure this is nothing to do with the Unionists?” asked Sergeant Elles, hunched forward on the steps leading into the market comptroller’s cabin. The small boat rocked. The cabin reeked of cheap tobacco and sweat. “I mean, this feels like some shit they’d be happy with.”

  Latch considered the question. Their skeleton clock had been identified as a notoriously mercenary factory owner, Mr. Charles Rudveld, with a penchant for underpaying workers using a rigged punch card machine. Davet had reported that the clock had been keeping perfect time. Not a second lost. Sure, the Unionists railed against Ith Tol’s historically poor industrial relations, but their protests and strikes had, so far, been largely peaceful affairs. This was something else entirely.

  “You’re thinking that Mr. Tock is all about workers’ rights in the coming utopia, Elles?” he said, hefting a coin he’d found on the cabin’s floor. “That explains all this?”

  “Like I fucking know.”

  Just after lunch, a milliner had come to the comptroller’s boat to pay the monthly fees on her steamer. She’d called from outside and received no response. This wasn’t remarkable. The comptroller, a studious man, was known to retreat into his cabin during inclement weather and it had been raining during the morning. The milliner, not wanting to return the next day—the man, however studious, was, as she put it, rather an objectionable fellow—clambered aboard and ducked into his cabin. Here, the comptroller was sitting behind his fold-out table, pen in hand, at work on his ledger. Only there were two ledgers, which was odd, and the man didn’t seem to be moving, which was odder. Odder still, there was a narrow, rectangular hole in his head. It was at this point that the milliner disembarked, started screaming—death, as she put it again, being known to give her a terrible turn—and the Watch was called in.

&nb
sp; “Looks like our comptroller kept up the appearance of a public servant,” said Latch. Light squeezed into the cabin though narrow cracks in the walls, flicking scratches of grey across the floor and low-hanging hammock. A few books stood on simple shelves. The coin seemed heavier than it was, larger than it was. There were jars of them stacked behind the comptroller like a wall. “A true man of the people.”

  Elles scoffed. “Yeah. A liar and a thief.”

  “Pillar of the community.”

  “A right crook.”

  Like the milliner had reported, the comptroller had been positioned behind his table, pen held above an open ledger. Beside this, another ledger, its columns crowded with sums owed and paid. And they all worked out perfectly. The hole in his head was actually a rectangular slot just large enough to accommodate a coin. One of the jars had been opened and placed at the comptroller’s elbow.

  Latch pushed the coin into the comptroller’s head and stepped back. “But a reformed one.”

  Clicking and whirring, the comptroller’s arm moved in stutters, the pen slowly pressed to the ledger, and then he started to write. Tick, tick, tick. First, a name appeared, then what the name owed, and, finally, what the name had paid. The whirring faded and the clicking stopped. It was the third time Latch had used a coin and, comparing the two books, he quickly figured the discrepancy: the comptroller had been overcharging for market berths, reporting takings at uninflated prices and pocketing the profit.

  “You reckon that’s what this is about, Latch?” asked Elles. She didn’t sound convinced. “That this Mr. Tock is reformer?”

  Latch edged around the table. “No. Not really. Reform isn’t usually about murdering the recidivist.” He remembered Davet saying something about designs and systems. “Transformation might be on his mind, though.”

  “You got that right.”

  “And these... inventions themselves aren’t all that public, aren’t being held up for spectacle. A reformer exclaims and proclaims, identifies evils and lays a course for their correction. A reformer lectures. Whatever these murders are, they’re not lectures.”