The Translated Man Read online

  Beckett looked up, and saw shattered buildings all around him, all made of shining, red-gold metal.

  The City of Brass.

  Eight: James Crowell in the Arcadium

  The narrow, twisting alleys off of St. Dunsany’s Street, beneath the topside neighborhood called Red Lanes, were the eeriest section of the city, at least as far as James Crowell was concerned. Not only was Dunsany’s Street, like all places in the Arcadium, strangely resistant to indications of time, but the labyrinthine alleys and lanes seemed to confuse space and direction as well. If Crowell hadn’t made this trip ten or fifteen times already, he could easily imagine himself getting lost; the first time, he’d returned to the same street three times without recognizing it, because he’d come at it from three different directions. From different angles, Quarter Down Street had a different play of shadows, and different light seeping in from Red Lanes. The single phlogiston street lamp, clearly visible when he came at it from Sower Street, was blocked by a verdigris-defaced bronze sign when he came at it from Exeter Street. The bronze equestrian statue, probably a representation of Janusz Vlytze, had the disturbing quality of looking like three heavyset men when viewed from the angle of Short Lane.

  He regretted not being able to keep the coach and horses that he drove, but horses generally didn’t care to go into the Arcadium. Moreover, Crowell’s employer at the livery stable had strict rules about taking coaches for personal use. Which meant that James Crowell had to walk through the increasingly frigid air as night settled over Trowth.

  If he’d been topside, in Red Lanes, the coachman would have seen the murky overcast slowly chill and sink to the ground, turning into a dense fog that would drain through the gaps in the upper streets, and begin to fill the Arcadium. The sky would become painfully clear as the atmosphere, which had the effect of blotting out the sun during the day, and kept baleful stars still hidden behind its dirty clouds, had the reverse effect on the moon: magnifying the cold, pale disc so that it hung heavy and bright over the pulsing blue lights of Trowth’s phlogiston streetlamps.

  Beneath Red Lanes, James Crowell only saw the fog creep in, and kept as close to the center of the cramped arteries of the Arcadium as he could. Vrylaks, the yellow, vampiric foglets that had come to Trowth with the wave of sharpsie immigrants, tended to lurk close to the ground along the walls. They were generally no trouble for a healthy adult man, but if that same man stumbled into a pack of them, they could crawl down his throat and drain the blood out through his lungs in seconds, leaving a red cloud of tiny droplets suspended in the air.

  Crowell shivered and tightened his scarf around his mouth. He was on his way back home from Printer’s Close, which was the only Close that was still used for the profession it took its name from. Fishery Close, for instance, hadn’t been a fish-market for twenty years, and the small courtyard of Advocate’s Close hadn’t been full of law firms for close to a hundred. Fleshmarket Close was likewise no longer full of butcher shops, but it had been filled by brothels, so almost everyone agreed that the name was still appropriate.

  He’d managed to get the first chapter of Tower of Brass in to Flood, Cheetham, and Crabtree Printers just before they closed up shop, which meant the pages would be on display the next morning for publishers to look at. If they found it interesting enough, they could put up the funding to have Flood et al. print it. And Crowell had to admit that this one was good.

  Tower of Brass wasn’t his, of course, but his son’s. James Crowell didn’t really approve of the boy writing about the kinds of things that the lurid, pulpy two-penny novels addressed, but it was his own fault. James hadn’t been able to afford to send his son to University, so all that talent went unrefined and uneducated, wasted. The young man that might have been remembered by history as the next Silas Ennering, the great Poet Laureate under Edmund II, would instead be barely recalled by history at all, and if he was, as a footnote when someone mentioned cheap horror stories.

  Still, the boy’s first novel, Ice House, had sold well, and Crowell rightfully felt that he could claim a piece of it. After all, it had been Crowell who’d given his son the kernels of truth that the boy had spun into an elaborate tale of terror. Elaborate enough, Crowell hoped, that no one would recognize it for what it was. Shouldn’t have told him, the notion had been haunting him for months, but he dismissed it. He and the boy had barely had anything to talk about since Mrs. Crowell had passed on. Besides, it was too late for regrets.

  The coachman warily eyed the filthy shape curled up in the corner of Quarter Down and Backstairs Streets. He was almost positive that the man had been following him, but it was hard to say with the degenerate poor in Trowth. They were all covered in filth and soot, and many of them, like this one, had the scrave—another disgusting gift the sharpsie immigrants had brought with them. The filthy man kept coughing up wads of luminescent green phlegm. If the beggar hadn’t smelled like an open sewer, Crowell might never have recognized him. As it was, the stench of sewage was both frighteningly familiar and highly unpleasant; Crowell took the stairs in Backstairs Street two at a time.

  Backstairs Street could hardly be called a street at all, as it was really a dark covered staircase that led up out of Quarter Down Street. The single lamp that someone had thoughtfully fixed to the wall had burned out, and puddles of gray, spent phlogiston covered the slippery stairs. The walls of the narrow stair were covered in cheap bills, affixed with the new “stichor” that the Rowan-Czarneckis had patented. The bills were barely visible in the light that seeped in from the streetlamps at the top of the stairs, and they were mostly about sharpsies: lurid images of the sharp-toothed humanoids making off with babies, or wallowing in their own filth, accompanied by mottos like “Protect Yourselves from Predators,” and “Clean Streets Win Wars.” There were two more bills showing copperplates of men being pleasured by tiny homunculi that read, “Culies Destroy Families!” Presumably, there were several posters encouraging young men to enlist in the Royal Marines, but they’d all been pasted over.

  Fear fluttered in his belly as he emerged from the Arcadium into Red Lanes. The tall, high-peaked Ennering-Crabtree houses leaned out over the relatively wide street, leaving the icy moonlight to fall in a narrow strip down the road. Stay calm. No one recognized it. They’d have come for you when it was published. Still, he couldn’t help thinking about Herman. Just sharpsie hooligans. Doesn’t mean anything. It was a shocking coincidence, nonetheless.

  The filthy, stinking man that the coachman had seen in the Arcadium now emerged from Backstairs, and now Crowell was certain he was being followed. He picked up his pace, and tried to think of the nearest public house he could get to. It didn’t matter which, just that it was crowded and nearby. Whoever the stinker was, he wouldn’t try anything serious if there were other people around. The Quarrel, he thought. Two blocks from here. Crowell was practically jogging now, as he came around the corner onto Cleaver Street.

  There was something waiting for him there, something strange. It was all wrapped up in a black coat and cloak, with a black hood over its head. It crouched in the middle of the street, then stood, then crouched again, as though it couldn’t stand being still. It was as tall as a man, but a deep, terrible dread filled Crowell as he realized that the thing in front of him was not a man at all. It twitched weirdly, rolling its head back and forth like it was looking for something.

  “Who…” Crowell’s voice cracked. He tried to work some moisture into his throat, while he stood frozen at the intersection. “Who is that?”

  There was no apparent change in the thing’s movements, but the coachman was suddenly aware of its attention. James Crowell practically jumped out of his skin. He pulled a small roll of bills from his pocket: the day’s pay. “I…I haven’t got much.” He tossed it on the ground. “But...take it, if you want.” He swallowed hard.

  The thing, still fifteen or twenty feet away, was abruptly very still. In the blink of an eye it was five feet away, almost close enough that it could
reach out and touch Crowell. It hadn’t moved so much as . . . slithered, or slipped. It crossed the space strangely, like its joints weren’t put together right. It swayed back and forth like a snake, then craned its head towards Crowell. It’s face was masked by black robes and shadow, but Crowell could see it turning, could hear vertebrae clicking as it twisted its head almost all the way around. There was a hideous wet slithering sound that came from beneath the thing’s tattered black cloak.

  Without warning, the thing snapped its head around to look up and off, at a precariously slanted upper storey to Crowell’s left. There was a loud, sudden crack like a gunshot, and James Crowell felt a hot knife jab through his chest. Puzzled, he looked down to see blood pouring from a hole in his shirt. Funny. Thought I had that hole fixed…he twisted around in time to see the filthy man lunge towards a deep doorway on the opposite side of the street, glittering silver in his hands.

  James Crowell’s legs suddenly felt very, very tired, and it was astonishingly easy to let them fold up, and to lay his face on the ground. Stunned, he closed his eyes. Blackness gripped his head like a vice.

  “Coroners!” Crowell heard someone call out, as though from the end of a long tunnel. “No one moves!”

  That same evening, between the time that Beckett began to see the City of Brass and James Crowell met with misfortune in Red Lanes, a young sharpsie male found himself walking back to Mudside from the shipyards alone. The next day, the broadsheets would say John Sharpish—which was the name that all the broadsheets used to refer to sharpsies, rather than try to transliterate their guttural native names—was swaggering brazenly, with a cruel look in his eye, shouting insults at women and threatening to eat their babies. At the time, however, the witnesses that had so conscientiously made their reports to the broadsheets would have been hard-pressed to say that the sharpsie was doing anything out of the ordinary, except perhaps walking very quickly.

  Whether John Sharpish had been hurrying because he was eager to be home or because he was nervous about being in human-dominated neighborhoods will remain a mystery, but his concerns about his environs were certainly borne out. As he passed through River Village, a quaint neighborhood that consisted almost entirely of public houses, warehouses, and extremely cheap brothels, John Sharpish found himself accosted by four men.

  Two of the men were gendarmes; two were dock-workers that had either volunteered or were conscripted for the task of eliminating the vermin from River Village. The surviving gendarme would later say that he’d been doing his solemn duty, to protect the health and well-being of the good people that had hired him. One of the two dock workers would say that he’d just been defending himself when the sharpsie had come at him, all teeth and murder on its face. The fourth man would remain stubbornly silent, asserting only that he’d “done what he had to.”

  The sharpsie had been moving at a quick clip through River Village, which represented a shorter but potentially more dangerous path back to Mudside. Sharpsies were no less welcome on the other side of the Stark in Bluewater, the indigeae ghetto, but there were fewer there with the means or the interest in physically removing them. The indigeae didn’t care for the sharpsies, but didn’t especially hate them either. Bluewater was safe, but River Village was faster; to safely traverse it, however, a young sharpsie needed to be quick.

  It didn’t help. The four men caught up with John Sharpish right at the foot of Old Williams’ Bridge: the stone road that led over the Stark and into Mudside. The bulk of the conversation between the four men and the sharpsie was never accurately reported in the broadsheets. Some people said they heard only shouting, some said they heard insults, others said that the sharpsie had made vicious threats in its own guttural language. It was not uncommon that those living around the few sharpsie communities should be familiar enough with the language to recognize threats and profanities; besides, witnesses asserted, they could tell by its tone.

  The humans and sharpsie apparently continued their heated discussion at some length before one of the dockworkers had enough, and smashed a bottle of whiskey over John Sharpish’s head. The sharpsie staggered and nearly fell into the river, but came back angry and out for blood. While the four men had certainly seen sharpsie jaws before, and abstractly recognized the danger presented by long, curved sharpsie teeth, they had certainly never seen those teeth put to such ferocious use.

  This particular John Sharpish managed to sever the gendarme’s cudgel-hand at the wrist with a single bite, and then nearly took the head off of the second. He bit almost deep enough to sever the spinal column, but certainly deep enough to kill the man instantly. The dockworkers, apparently armed with cudgels of their own in addition to bottles of liquor, immediately fell upon the sharpsie, beating him severely with clubs and fists.

  The two men did not stop until the sharpsie had been ground to a pulp on the cobblestones by Old William’s Bridge. Only after he was dead did they make an attempt to find help for the two gendarmes.

  The man without a throat was clearly lost. The man who had lost his hand was taken in at a trolljrman hospital the instant it was revealed that he’d lost the limb to a sharpsie. In an act of startling generosity, Hahd Khat, a clutch-mother at the hospital, offered to pay for both the surgeries and funeral expenses of the gendarmes.

  Nine: The City of Brass, Skinner

  Seeing the City of Brass wasn’t the same thing as being awake in a strange place. It was more like dreaming a familiar place; the City of Brass had the quality of a half-submerged memory, but it was like no place that Beckett had ever visited. It was a fragment from an imaginary childhood, and a person only ever saw it deep in dreaming.

  Like a dream, there was no stability to the vision. Background became foreground, and the brass towers twisted to resemble whatever idle thoughts crossed the mind, or else they slipped away like water through clenched fists. Beckett could see through his own eyes, and also see himself standing among the shifting towers. Sometimes he wore his heavy coroner’s overcoat, sometimes he wore nothing. Sometimes the Fades were worse, making large tracks of skin and flesh invisible, disappearing his hands; sometimes, the Fades had completely vanished.

  The tall golden towers loomed over him, sometimes very far, sometimes very near. The only constant was the blank black sky overhead, and the huge, yellow-green moon that cast its sickly light on the brass towers. Somehow, Beckett could also see the dark, wooden corners of his room, the intricate whorls of plaster on the ceiling above him as he stared at it.

  He was in the city, though Elijah Beckett could not have said how he knew it was a city. The brass towers had no doors or windows, nothing that resembled architecture of any kind. They were clearly made of metal, but in many places they looked like melted wax. The city did not extend forever; it was surrounded by empty black space on all sides—an island of shiny towers beneath the foul moonlight.

  A shape moved in the shadow of a brass spire, and Beckett found himself suddenly closer to it. Not close enough that he could see it clearly, but close enough that he worried about attracting its attention. The shape was hunched and black, snuffling close to the ground.

  The Reanimate, Beckett thought, the idea clear in his mind as ideas in dreams sometimes are. I’m dreaming about the Reanimate. No… it couldn’t be the Reanimate, because it wasn’t really black at all. It was a kind of blue-purple, like a bruise. Was that a robe that it wore, or skin that hung from its limbs in saggy folds?

  Then he saw an arm extricate itself from the hunched black shape, an arm that ended in a nest of slimy, black, boneless ribbons of flesh that twisted and rolled and looped around each other.

  Sounds trickled in to Beckett’s dreaming ears. There were hundreds of muttering voices; wet, slurping voices that clacked their teeth most vigorously. And there was another sound, a deep rasping noise, metal being drawn along metal, but from very far away.

  Bruise-black shapes were all around him now, faces low to the ground and snuffling. Beckett wondered if he was still dream
ing, or if all the dreams before had been dreams, but this one was somehow real. He looked up at the yellow leprous light of the moon, and felt it tugging on his eyes. He heard the sound of a door opening, and wood scraping on wood, and the moon seemed suddenly very near.

  “Elijah?”

  The yellow light filled his vision and for a brief moment their positions were reversed, and it was Beckett that floated high above the moon, where black basalt cities crept across its face like an infection.

  “Elijah!”

  The moon was gone, and then he was in the City of Brass, empty again like it always was, an island of red-gold metal in a black sea that was really his own room. It was his own room, but he couldn’t see it right, because the venom had done something to his eyes, had changed them so that they saw cities and leeches.

  “Elijah!”

  Whose voice is that? I should dream alone, Beckett told himself, and then he was choking on black seawater again, buffeted by titanic, stormy waves.

  Blink.

  Beckett was in his room, lying on the floor, coughing ferociously. His lungs felt bruised, but it felt good to draw in long, shuddering breaths. There was still enough veneine in his system to keep the pain out of his joints. The back of his right hand twitched, but the cramp seemed to have gone.

  Skinner was standing over him. “Elijah, are you all right? What’s happening?”

  Beckett groaned and tried to get to his feet. “Fine.” His head spun, and he reached out to grab the bed-post. “Nothing, I mean. I’m fine. Nothing’s happening.”

  “You sounded like you were choking.” There was a white bird perched on her shoulder, cocking its head back-and-forth in a weirdly mechanical rhythm. He tried to blink the bird away, but it was a stubborn hallucination.