Case MO70

[The recording opens with two minutes of silence]

Marshal: Would you like to explain yourself, Captain?

[Silence]

Marshal: No, of course you wouldn’t.

[Silence]

Marshal: I’m…not sure if you remember, Captain Macy, but we were in the same field hospital at the end of the war. I’d just lost a third of my body to an alchemy bomb, and I felt like my life was over. Couldn’t walk, eye torn out of my face, wherever I still had feeling in my body, it just hurt. All I could do was sit in that death tent.

[Silence]

Marshal: Then they brought you in. Pale and bleeding and missing an arm. And you were smiling, and telling jokes, and helping some of the wounded with writing letters. The nurses had trouble keeping you in bed because you were ready to talk to anybody up for a conversation, even though you were so weak that you almost fell four times. Some poor corporal bedridden with the runs asked why the hell you were so cheery and you said that, if you let that sorcerous cannonball turn you sour, then you might as well have let it kill you.

[Silence]

Marshal: I don’t think I would have lasted until the New Marshal Initiative if you hadn’t put that into my head. I wasn’t dead until I let myself be dead. And now I get to take what happened to me and try and make things better for everyone. I was hoping I’d get to work with you, even. I suggested you as a candidate for the Initiative. I can’t blame you for turning it down, not when you have kids to raise. And you do have kids to raise, still.

[Silence]

Marshal: We’ve still got the rest of our lives left, Captain. I intend on doing some good with mine. Will you join me, or are you going to sit and sulk until your hair turns grey?

Witness: I’m not the one who’s stuck, Goodman. There’s no point in all this recording and note-taking. They are so far goddamn beyond us that we will never be able to make them answer for tearing through our lives like shrapnel. Even your boss thinks so. All we can do is sit knowing it’s our fault, for not stopping them, for inspiring them to do it in the first place. We don’t even have Lament around to blame, if he’s even still alive. I’m happy to move on - but we can’t do that because you need your answers, because you won’t leave well enough alone.

Marshal: Nothing heals if you don’t let it breathe.

Witness: And nothing heals if you keep picking at the scab.

Marshal: People died, Macy. Last month, last year, and two decades ago. We can’t bring them back, and with the order from Grant, we can’t even tell them upfront. But we can at least make sure that the answers exist, for someone. I…

[Silence]

Marshal: I need this. Too many people died and it’s my fault. If I can understand it, write it all down, maybe I can keep things from falling apart next time. Please.

[Silence]

Witness: I’m going to start talking. When I stop talking, you close this damn case and you never bother me about it again.

Marshal: I’ll respect your wishes. Thank you.

Witness: Okay. Got there by train with Marshal 19 and his top men. Walstead…fine, I brought her. Snuck her on.

Marshal: You didn’t…happen to use a box with holes in it, did you?

Witness: What? Are you mad? I just took someone’s dirty uniform and gave it to her. She’s not a bad actress; could have done plays instead of dirty jokes. Gave her a cap to hide her hair, told the Marshal ‘he’ was carrying my bags and nobody questioned me.

Marshal: Sorry, it was just…please, never mind and move on.

Witness: While we were getting off the train, we heard a terrible calamity coming from City Hall and the Marshal had us rush over, but-

Marshal: There was a sudden outgrowth of half-dead plants. Corn, maybe?

Witness: Nope. Thought I saw something waving in the breeze a few blocks ahead, above the rooftops. That could’ve been corn, maybe. We got blackberry brambles, shriveled fruit bursting in the cold while thorns dug into our legs. Entangled us and swept back towards the station. Absolute nightmare.

Marshal: And the Marshal? No amount of thorns could break that stone.

Witness: He took a few minutes to catch up. When he did, he tried to cut us out of the bramble patch, but the road gave out on him, fell into a sinkhole. Guess there were too many half-dead roots and not enough dirt under the street at that point.

Marshal: Hah. You never really internalize how much heavier your footsteps are. You’ll have to lead for a while; what happened after that is still cloudy.

Witness: Well, I had my own knife and was trying to cut myself out, but…man alive, I hate saying it, but two homunculi managed to sneak up on me. Dragged me out of the bramble, cutting me up every which way as they did.

Marshal: Homunculi? I thought all of them were close to the hanging.

Witness: I think she probably whipped those up herself. Didn’t feel like the usual kind. Less butchershop, more lumberyard.

Marshal: She? Campbell?

Witness: Could barely recognize her. Looked wilder and madder than Bean’s strongman. She was holed up in a hotel room looking over the street and pouring tinctures out the window onto a gnarled knot of roots like some kind of witch. The muncus dragged me up there and she said some nonsense about being onto my plan against her, like I knew she’d be here ahead of time. Then she set the muncus on me. Fought like hell, but I was still bleeding from the brambles and I dropped my gun while they were carrying me and…

[Sigh]

Witness: Walstead got out of the bramble with her birds and…saved me. I’m sure you can draw your conclusions from that.

Marshal: I can. The portrait the scene painted was inchoate but all too clear.

Witness: By the time she…got me free and we’d both…recovered from the experience, I’d lost a lot of blood, so…she helped me back out into the streets. Any of the MAs still left in the bramble were dead with…thorns in their throats.

Marshal: Odd. Did she do it while you were captured, or in her death throes did she-

Witness: On your own time. I don’t want to think about it. Wasn’t sure what happened to the Marshal or the two survivors; I guess they went on ahead to the gallows.

Marshal: They did. According to one of those two MAs, the Marshal and they were able to eventually bring order to the rioting crowd.

Witness: Mhm. Matilda used her birds to track down Geraldine. Neither of us really knew what we’d do with each other when we finally got her; figured we’d scrap about it and whoever was still standing would get to save her. But I was too wounded to raise a fuss and Walstead…less wounded but more horrified.

Marshal: And you found her, Victor Freestone and Prince Remus in that alleyway.

[Silence]

Witness: Victor’s father. That was Victor’s father in that alleyway. Goodman, how much do you know about Victor’s father?

Marshal: Considering the orders coming down from the White House about him, more than I’m supposed to. The wizards thought he was Prince Remus, the escaped slave who supposedly fed the Union all sorts of secrets that ensured we won the war. But we never got any firm intelligence on him before now. We were able to at least find traces of his mother among Francois’s files but his father just didn’t exist.

Witness: He doesn’t, not really, and he’s not Prince Remus. Prince Remus is just a tale. He’s something old and tricky that heard the rumors about Prince Remus and decided to become him. It’s a mask he uses to keep himself human enough to be with humans.

Marshal: You have access to classified intelligence I can’t even see?

Witness: No. Asked him back in 1862.

[Silence]

Marshal: I don’t believe you. Who really told you that?

Witness: I didn’t believe me either. It was back in Tennessee, after Fort Henry. Shared a few smuggled bottles of whiskey with the other captains to celebrate the first big victory on that front. Woke up in the middle of the night and saw him sipping from a bottle and slipping something into Ames’s jacket. I asked him if he was Prince Remus as a joke, and that’s more or less what he told me, that keeping the Union alive and speeding its victory along was just his hobby. Since I was still half-drunk, I cursed him out for treating our lives like they were a game, and then he…he thought it would thrill his wife and daughter. That was his stake in it, that they’d relish the fall of the Confederacy.

Marshal: My God, Lilith and…Victor?

Witness: I told him I had a daughter too and he told me he was sure she was a good kid - but his was better. Almost got up to punch him but I was so drunk I couldn’t stand, so I just turned over and passed out again. I was sure that was a dream. Ames never said anything about it, after all, and his next few battles were utter routs. But then I found that same Negro down an arm and saw in his weak little smirk that he remembered me.

[Silence]

Marshal: Wasn’t…Ames part of the team that prevented the Lincoln assassination?

Witness: Maybe? Who the hell knows. Maybe he turned Grant over during one of his relapses and kept him from drowning in his own puke. Don’t you get it? Don’t you get what fools we’ve been? Lament feared Victor because he thought he was the child of evil incarnate, but he was also the child of the Union’s guardian angel. If I had tried to trust him, if I reined Lament in…maybe she would have let me follow her.

Father,

I’m not going home. I don’t think I can go home even if I wanted to; if Mattie almost got indicted, I’d certainly be next. I can’t keep living in that town knowing what Bean did and knowing you of all people protected him. Victor wasn’t perfect, but he was right. Something’s wrong with America, with us who came over from Europe. I don’t know if I can fix it, but I can’t pretend the problem doesn’t exist.

Wherever I go, I know I stand on the books you brought home for me and the encouragement you gave me. You were a good father; I just wish you were a better person.

Tell Mother I’ll be fine and I’m sorry. Tell the boys that they won’t have me to tease anymore, and that doesn’t mean they should go and find someone else to tease. Tell Henshaw that I wish I loved it better.

[Silence]

Marshal: We can only do what we can with the mistakes we’ve made. Sometimes you can’t just fix things.

Witness: We can’t. We’re just men. Victor’s something different.

[Silence? No, a shuffling noise, like fabric]

Marshal: Captain, your stump! It’s-

Witness: Finished weeping. I passed out from the bleeding while I was waiting for them to finish the surgery, to decide what should be done with me, and when I woke up…

Mr. Macy,

I have taken the liberty of mending your wounds, as compensation for keeping Matilda safe until she could return with my mother’s voice and my mother’s bones. At Geraldine’s request, I also saw to your oldest wound with her and my father and found a solution.

The key, at it turned out, lie with your remaining hand. Did you know the tendons in that hand are partially inflamed in such a way that your hand naturally shapes itself to hold a gun? There’s similar inflammations and stiffness all the way up your arm. When I realized that, I took a look further up the blasphemed stump and found swollen nerves snaking their way all the way up to your spine. Your body was holding onto the blasphemy like it’s trying to keep it from wrenching out of your arm and biting you.

We had to cut away much of the affected nerve issue, but the blasphemy is out. I’ll dispose of it safely later. You will lose some sensation in the affected area, but what mobility it still has shouldn’t be affected.

You were kind to me once. And you were useful in the string of bluffs that kept me alive long enough to be saved. I will not set aside that you helped to plot my demise, or my mother’s; if you follow us again, it will be her who decides your fate. But I am sorry we part on such terms. May this last service, free of charge, smooth over the state in which I left Henshaw.

Witness: I haven’t told anybody except my wife and now you. The way the White House is moving, making it public will get me in trouble anyhow.

Marshal: I don’t…understand. You’ve been so miserable with a cured blasphemy? Roger, there are hundreds of me who would beg for the same!

Witness: I would rather my family whole and a festering stump for the rest of my life.

Marshal: I would have one and be happy!

[Silence]

Witness: Mhm. I’m…sorry about your wife.

Marshal: This is not an easy day for either of us.

Witness: I’ll finish up then. I woke up in this rundown theater, Victor’s father lying next to me. The other three were sitting near the door, arguing about how they’d get out of the city. Victor’s father actually talked with me for a while. Joked about us matching with our missing arms, bemoaned his ‘other son’ and how he ran back to some place called Gimley, just rattled on about nonsense like a man under fever. And then Marshal 19 broke the door down.

[Scraping sound]

Marshal: He was there? You were the last person to see him before-

Witness: Back off and let me tell it. The minute he saw Victor, he grabbed him, accused him and his father of fomenting the riot at the gallows.

Marshal: That… is technically not wrong?

Witness: Don’t think it would have mattered with Henshaw hanging over the man’s head. The two women fought the marshal like hell, Matilda’s animals and Gigi’s gizmos, but they weren’t breaking stone. Then Victor’s father sat straight up, mumbled for a few seconds and the Marshal just…

[Silence]

Witness: You sure you want to hear this, Goodman?

Marshal: Get it over with.

Witness: I didn’t hear all of it but…something about a farm and the worth of bad apples, and a word in a language I didn’t know. And the Marshal melted. The clay turned to bloody mud. I saw him start to panic and start to scream but it just came out as this gurgle ‘cause he was trying to scream through mud. He looked me in the eyes and, my God, it was the worst thing I’ve ever felt and I just fainted dead. That’s all I know.

Marshal: That…I was afraid of that. It sounds like what happened to a few people who almost become marshals. The clay rejects them and sloughs off. At the NMI, they always pulled them out the minute we saw something was wrong. If they didn’t…well that explains why he just screams now. God, did he drag himself to where we found him in the streets or did they drop him off? How long did he have to huddle in that alleyway all-

Witness: You’re picking at it. Stone might hide your face but I can hear the panic in your voice. Drop it.

Marshal: Fine, just…fine. It’s just…McClellan lost a lung. The Marshal process let him breathe normally; to go back to that after years of-

Witness: Lewis. Don’t to it to yourself.

[Silence]

Marshal: ‘Farnsworth’. You misheard him. Farnsworth, bad apples…Farnworth let a bad apple in, maybe. Odd that that’s what he went with. Do you think he knew him?

Witness: Isn’t it on the record that someone smuggled a golem recipe to your bosses from Prague? If that was, him if he was the one who helped him make marshals, maybe he knew how to…

Marshal: Unmake us.

[Silence]

Witness: That’s all I got. When I woke up again, they were all gone, including the Marshal. Just left these parting letters. I got out, found some MAs, gave my initial report, and that’s it. God, I never want to tell this story again.

Marshal: I am…starting to understand why the case is being buried.

Witness: Mhm. And this is just what we know we don’t understand. My daughter…went into a pit too dark for me to even pick her out as she falls. And the damndest thing is that she belongs there, and not with me. Like a damn bat.

[Silence]

Marshal: Thank you, Captain, for this last indulgence. And I’m sorry.

Witness: Pah, you could have slapped me and you’d have been in the right. Helped a bit to get that all off my chest. Just wish…well, Judith’s never going to forgive me for losing her husband. He really was my best friend for all those years; I didn’t think he’d just-

Marshal: You’re picking at it too.

Witness: Hah. God. We’re a sorry pack of broken parts, aren’t we?

Marshal: It was worth it. We fought for a better world. And we have it now, here today. It’s just not good enough. Not yet.

Witness: Well, if it’s up to us, I’d better get back to work then. Can’t leave Fry in charge of Henshaw for another month. Good luck with your next case, Goodman.

Marshal: It’s Marshal 24. And thank you.

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