Mr. Stitch by Chris Braak

fuck’s sake.” He waved the copper coroner’s shield in front of the man’s face.
    “It’s illegal, for one,” said the man, middle-aged, with graying hair and a sturdy familiarity with his job that he was plainly loathe to forgo. He wore red and purple robes with an ornate white and gold shawl; finery deeply at odds with the man’s stubbornly ordinary features. He looked as though the real secretary’s adjunct had stepped out for tea, and just thrown a cassock over a local shoemaker and had him fill in. “And it’s a heresy for another. Do you want me to get in trouble?”
    “You can’t get in trouble,” you fucking idiot, Valentine said. “I am the Coroners. If someone were going to come here and arrest you and execute you, it would be me, and I’m already not going to do that.” YOU FUCKING IDIOT .
    The man had wet lips that he kept licking nervously. He pouted suddenly. “How do I know this isn’t some kind of a trick?”
    Valentine suppressed the urge to pound his head on the desk. It was a lovely wooden desk, in the adjunct’s small, tastefully-appointed office. There were books on the shelves, weathered and worn as though they’d actually been read, and a podium with a great, leather-bound copy of the Grammars on it. “Well, that’s a good point. But, how do you know what my plan is? Maybe I’m here to arrest you for impeding an official investigation, and I’m just trying to trick you into not letting me see the books.”
    The adjunct paused, and actually seemed to consider the idea, which nearly had Valentine chewing the carpets in frustration. “All right,” the man said, after a moment. “But you’ve got to make sure that you sign in.”
    He led the coroner through the corridors of Vie Abbey. The Abbey had been built long before the Architecture Wars, and so well before the Vie-Gorgon’s had settled on their long, thin, narrow style of design. The Abbey had an old-world feel to it—broad hallways, fat columns on geometric plinths, galleries and balconies everywhere. What wasn’t dull gray granite was covered in rich, vibrant tapestries, depicting the history of the Goetic Church and the Church Royal all the way back to the Immolation. They followed the halls down past the library, to a dank, wooden room filled with rough tables and dirt.
    “You have to wait here while I get the ledger,” the man said, and left.
    Valentine sat down on one of the benches and tapped his feet. He’d begun to read the quarto that Beckett had found, as per instructions, but was having a certain amount of trouble. It wasn’t that the text was unclear: it was, in fact, almost frighteningly clear. And specific. And simple. It was the kind of text that could have instructed a ten-year-old in heretic science and produced quality results. The problem was simply that Valentine had nothing to compare it to—whether this quarto was more or less simple than traditional ectoplasmatic texts, whether it conformed to establish beliefs on heresy or church doctrine, the coroner had no idea.
    One of the troubles , he mused, while he waited for the adjunct to return, with secret information is that those of us who are charged with finding it won’t recognize it when we see it. The Coroners were given scant little information about the nature of the crimes they were to investigate—only the effects. Beckett had gleaned more than a little just from his history, but Valentine was stumbling about in the dark. And, lucky stumbler that he was, the young man had stumbled onto an idea: the Church Royal, he knew, made a habit of collecting heretical texts. They were rare, of course, and access was restricted. But if he could just get in and have a look at one or two, it might give him…well, he didn’t know what it might give him. He only knew that he didn’t know anything now, and could only think of one way of knowing more: the library.
    “Here it is,” the church official said as he returned, carrying a huge, dusty