The Doktor's Spyglass

Chapter 1

That Keynish Helg was several days dead was perfectly obvious to Constable Abney up until the moment the doktor started talking.

It was a few things gave the doktor's state away to Abney: the smell, first off. The honey-wine scent of decay, wafting from the man's yellow skin, waxen and hard-looking. One short, assertive sniff over the corpse told him that much, just like the commandant showed them in the surgeon's cutting room, one sniff to get the dead man's stink in your nose. You'll know it by the smell, he said. Then there was the stillness: the body was stuck hard, not moving, plastered to that contraption of a chair like moss on a rock. Men were like to move, in sleep; to snore and murmur. Abney was certain in any case that all men breathed of a night, no matter how deep their slumbers. Helg didn't. His sunken chest was still as a statue. He didn't know what to make of the thing on his face, but seeing as it covered most of it he could only presume it had something to do with what killed him.

So it was troubling when the doktor's cadaver started speaking, though he only ever said one word: Seffa. A girl's name, that—though what use a dead man would have for it, Constable Abney didn't know. But seeing as how dead men rarely spoke, that Abney knew, he felt himself behooved to reconsider his earlier judgment.

* * *

"Make yourself useful, Abney, and get the fuck out of my way," said Thijis, scraping crabscum out of the bowl of his pipe with a pocketknife and flicking it onto the floor with a wet smack. He didn't need to look up to see the gape-mouthed expression on the boy's face. Abney was new, and had the wits of a swamp ox: steady enough under the yoke, but liable to drown himself eating breakfast if left to his own devices. Taking another crabling from his pouch, its tiny legs scrabbling at his callused fingertips, Thijis pinched its carapace until it popped with a wet hiss. Stuffing it into his pipe, he sealed the bowl, relit the boiler, and puffed furiously until he had it bubbling again. "And bring in my case. It's in the carriage boot."

Abney opened his mouth to say something, apparently thought better of it, and ducked out of the doktor's laboratory, passing Krizner on the way. The older man looked pale with exertion—either hung over or simply done in by the dozen or so steps from the street to the house's grand entrance hall. Or both.

"They're getting smarter every year, I see," Thijis said around his pipe stem.

"Who, Abney?" asked Krizner, leaning a hand on the bronze doorframe to catch his breath. "He's not a bad sort. Just needs direction, that's all."

"Why know how to button your trousers, when your commanding officer's there to tell you, eh?"

"Fuck off, Irik." Krizner stood next to him. "So he's not dead after all?"

"Who in God's name said he was dead?"

"Abney said—"

Thijis choked with laughter, coughing wetly around his pipe. Krizner cut off, glowering. After giving himself a few moments to clear his throat with some phlegmy laughter, Thijis gestured to Helg's half-naked form. The lips worked slightly, as if the man were whispering to himself, just out of hearing.

"I think even Abney must be working it out, right about now, that corpses don't talk," he said. "But it takes a truly shrewd mind to observe that dead men don't drool." He pointed at the glistening trail of saliva flowing from the doktor's mouth with his pipe stem.

"He doesn't even look like he's breathing," said Krizner.

"That's because he's not."