Kell's Legend (17 page)

Anu had cut out Shabis’s fangs. The ultimate symbol of the vachine.

“No!” wailed Shabis, blood-oil pumping as the cogs in her head, in her heart, ejected precious blood-oil. “What have you done to me, Anukis?” She climbed to her feet, ran to Vashell, who put out his arms to
comfort her as she sobbed, her blood-oil leaking into his clothing and his eyes lifted to read Anukis who stood, face bleak, as she retracted her single claw.

“Now you need another assassin,” said Anu, triumph in her eyes.

Vashell nodded. “You are correct.” With a savage shove, he pushed Shabis away, drew his brass sword, and with a swift hard horizontal swipe, cut Shabis’s head from her body. Blood and blood-oil spurted, hitting the ceiling, drenching the walls and bed in a twisting shower of sudden ferocity. Shabis’s head hit the sodden carpet, eyes wide, mouth open in shock, pretty features stained. Anu could see the clockwork in her severed neck, between the fat and the muscle, the veins and the bone, nestled and intricate, bonded, and it was all still spinning happily, now slowing, as cogs could not mesh and a primary shaft failed in its delicate spin. Shabis’s eyes closed, and her separated body folded slowly to the carpet, as if deflating. Her vachine aborted. Shabis died.

“No!” screamed Anu, running forward, dropping to her knees beside the corpse of her sister. Her head snapped up. “You will die for this!” she raged.

“Show me.” Vashell still held his sword; it was a special blade, specifically designed for slaying vachine; for the killing of their own kind. It had a multi-layered blade, and carried a disruptive charge. It wasn’t so much sharp as…created to cut through clockwork.

Anu’s eyes narrowed. “You are a V Hunter?” she said.

“Yes.” He smiled. It was a sickly smile, half pride, half…something else. Amongst the vachine, the V
Hunters were despised; it was a rank handed out by the Watchmakers, and a V Hunter’s sole role was to hunt down and exterminate rogue vachine…to cleanse and, essentially, betray their own. Amongst the population they were feared and loathed. Their identities were kept secret, so they could work undercover throughout Silva Valley. They reported directly back to the Watchmakers, and indeed the Patriarch, and answered to no Engineer.

“You have been hunting me all this time?”

Vashell laughed, and sheathed his sword. He turned, running hands through his hair drenched in the blood-oil of Shabis. He turned back, and stared down at Anu. “Don’t be so naive. What would I want with you, pretty little plaything?”

“What
do
you want, then?”

“I want something much more precious. I want your father, Anukis. I want Kradek-ka. He has gone; fled. Left you to suffer, along with…that.” He stared, a snarl, at Shabis’s corpse. “Now, you will take me to him. By all that is holy, by all the relics of our ancestors, you will take me to Kradek-ka.”

Anukis overcame her fear, and snarled with fangs ejecting, and leapt; Vashell dropped his shoulder, and with an awesome blow backhanded Anukis across the room where she hit the wall, cracking plaster, and hit the floor on her head, crumpling into a heap. She groaned, broken, and her eyes flickered open.

“I’ll leave you to clean up the corpse,” said Vashell, and leaving footprints in Shabis’s blood, he stalked from the room.

Anu stared for long, agonising moments, her eyes seeming to meet those of her dead sister. Tears rolled down her cheeks, her body slumped to the ground, and her eyes closed as she welcomed the oblivion of pain and darkness.

It began as a ball. A tight ball; white, pure, hot like a sun. And that ball was anger, and hatred, and rage so pure, so hot, that it engulfed everything, it engulfed her concept of family and name and honour and duty and love and spread, covering the city and the valley and the Black Pike Mountains; finally it overtook the world, and the sun, and the stars, and the galaxy and everything broiled in that tiny hot plasma of rage and Anu’s eyes flickered open and it was dark, and cool, and she was thankful.

She lay on a steel bench. She was dressed in plain clothes, and boots. She looked down, and started, and started to weep. Her vachine claws had been removed, the ends of her bloody fingers blunt stumps. She reached up, and winced as she felt the holes where her fangs should have been. Inside her, she felt the heavy
tick tick tick
of clockwork, in her head and in her breast; and she cursed Vashell, and cursed the Engineers, for they had taken away her weapons and she would rather be dead. It was what they once did to criminals before the Justice Laws, and just before a death-sentence was meted out. It was the lowest form of aberration. The lowest form of dishonour; beyond, even, the transformation to canker. Even a canker had fangs.

Winter sunshine bled in through a high window, and Vashell emerged smugly through a door. He wore
subtle vachine battledress, skin-armour, they called it, beneath woollen trousers and a thick shirt and cloak. His weapons, also, were hidden. His eyes shone.

“Get up.”

“No.”

“Get up!” He ejected a claw, and held it to her eye. “Anukis, I will take you apart limb by limb, orb by orb, tooth by tooth. I will massacre you, but your clockwork, your mongrel vachine status, will keep you alive. We know Kradek-ka made you special; you think us fools? You think the Engineers haven’t been inside you? Examined every cog, every wheel, every tiny shaft and pump? Kradek-ka did some very special things to you, Anukis, technology we didn’t even know existed. First, we were going to kill you. It was fitting. You are an abomination. But then a specialist discovered…the advanced technology, inside of you. You will help me find Kradek-ka. I promise you this.”

“I don’t know where to look,” she said, voice low, staring at the razor tip of Vashell’s claw.

“I have a start point. But first, I want to show you something.”

Vashell tugged on a thin golden lead, almost transparent, and scaled with a strange quartz mesh; sometimes, it could be seen, rippling like liquid stone; other times it was completely invisible, depending on how it caught the light. Anukis felt the jolt, and realised it was connected to her throat. Another humiliation. Another vachine slight.

Vashell tugged, and Anukis was forced to stand. She growled, tried to eject her fangs by instinct but only pain flowed through her jaws. She wept then,
standing there on the leash. She wept for her freedom; but more, she wept for her dead sister, wept for her lost father.

“Follow me.”

Anukis had little choice.

“Where is this?”

“Deep. Within the Engineer’s Palace.”

“I did not know these corridors, and these rooms, existed.”

“Why should you? Even Kradek-ka would not tell you everything. After all,” he smiled, eyes dark, filled with an inner humour, “you are female.”

The corridors were long, and the more they delved into the Engineer’s Palace, the deeper they penetrated, conversely, the more bare and more undecorated it became. Gone were carpets, silk hangings, works of oil-art. Instead, bare metal, rusted in places, became the norm. Deeper they travelled, Anukis trotting a little to keep up with Vashell’s long stride.

They walked for an hour. Behind some doors they heard grinding noises, deep and penetrating; behind others jolts of enormous power like strikes of lightning. Behind others, they heard rhythmical thumping, or the squeal of metal on metal. Yet more were deadly silent beyond, and for some reason, these were the worst for Anukis. Her imagination could create Engineer horrors worse than anything they could show her.

Vashell stopped, and Anukis nearly ran into him. She was lost in thought, drowning in dreams. She
pulled up tight, and he looked down, his look arrogant, his eyes mocking, and she thought:

One day, I will see you weep.

One day, I will watch you beg, and squirm, in the dirt, like a maggot.

One day, Vashell. You will see.

“We are here,” he said.

“Where?”

“The Maternity Hall. Your father’s creation.”

“Maternity Hall? I have never heard of this.” A cold dread began to rise slowly through her, and Vashell pushed at the solid metal door, grey and unmarked, and Anukis found herself led into a huge, vacuous chamber which stretched off further than the eye could see. It was filled with booths and benches, and the air was infused with the cries of babes.

Goose-bumps ran up and down Anu’s spine. She stood, stock still, her eyes taking in the bleak, grey place.

She walked forward, as far as her leash would allow, and Vashell tugged her to a halt. Obedience. She stared at benches, where babes lay, squirming, their cries ignored as Engineers worked on them. In the booths which drifted away she could see what looked like medical operations taking place. Many of the babes were silent, obviously drugged. Around some, a cluster of Engineers worked frantically. Every now and again, a buzz filled the air, or a click, or a whine.

Anu stared up at Vashell. “What are they doing?” she whispered.

“Welcome to Birth,” said Vashell. “You don’t think the vachine create themselves, do you? Every single
vachine is a work of art, a sculpture of science and engineering; every vachine is created from a baby template, the fresh meat brought here shortly after birth to have the correct clockwork construct grafted, added, injected, implanted, and from thence the true vachine can grow and meld and begin to function.”

“So…we all begin as human?”

“Yes.”

“But we feed from human blood! The refined mix of blood-oil! That makes us…little more than cannibals!”

Vashell shrugged, and smiled. “Blood of my blood,” he said, sardonically. “I find it hard to believe Kradek-ka never explained it to you. He kept you in a bubble, Anukis. He created this; this structure, this schedule, he elevated the systems of clockwork integration to make us better, superior, to elevate us above a normal impure flesh. With vachine integration we are the perfect species. Can you not see this, Anukis? This is your family’s life work. This is the creation of the vachine.”

Anu sagged, leaning against Vashell, her mind spinning as she watched a thousand babies undergoing vachine integration. She saw scalpels carving through flesh, through baby chests and into hearts, replacing organic components with clockwork, replacing valves and arteries with gears and tubes. Babies cried, squealed, and their wails were hushed by pads held over mouths until they lost consciousness. Blood trickled into slots and was carried away to be further refined and fed back into Blood Refineries in order to create the blood-oil pool.

“We are vampires,” said Vashell, staring down at Anu who was pale and grey, a shadow of her former self. “Machine vampires. We feed on the human shell; revel, in our total superiority.”

“What we’re doing is
wrong,
” snarled Anu.

“Why? The creation of a superior species?” Vashell laughed. “Your naivety both astounds and amuses me. Here, the rich noble daughter, blood-line of our very own vachine creators—and you do not even understand the basics?”

A babe squealed and there was a chopping sound. Anu saw the flash of a silver blade. The tiny head rolled into a chute and was sucked away. The corpse was thrown into a bag, and an Engineer moved to a distant cart and slung the body aboard, along with all the other medical waste.

“So,” said Anu, fighting for air, “every babe that is born, here in Silva Valley, it comes here? It comes to be formed into vachine?”

“Yes. But more than Silva; the vachine have spread, Anu. We are breeding soldiers in other valleys. We are growing strong! We grow mighty! Our time for domination, for expansion, for Empire, is close.”

“But-” said Anu.

Vashell frowned. “What do you mean?”

“Something is wrong,” said Anu, with primitive intuition. “What’s going on, Vashell? What’s happening here?”

“We need to find Kradek-ka.” He scowled. He would say no more.

For an hour Vashell dragged Anukis through the Maternity Hall, and she saw things so barbaric she
wouldn’t have believed them possible. The babies were operated on, implanted with clockwork technology—in their hearts, in their brains, in their jaws, in their hands. Even at such a young age they were given weapons of death, using blood-oil magic, clockwork, and liquid brass and gold, silver-quartz and polonium, in order to control and power and time the mechanisms of the vachine.

“How many work?” she said, at last, exhausted.

“I do not understand?”

“How many babes…become vachine? Successfully?”

“Fifty five in a hundred successfully make it through the—shall we say, medical procedures. Fifty five in a hundred accept the clockwork, accept the fangs, and can grow and meld and adapt and think of themselves as true machine.”

“What about the others?”

“Most die,” said Vashell, sadly. “This is a great loss; if we could improve the rate of melding, our army would be much larger; we could advance so much more quickly.”

“And?”

“The cankers?” Vashell laughed. “They have their uses.”

“Take me away from this place,” said Anu, tears on her cheeks, fire in her part-clockwork heart.

“As you wish. I thought you needed to know, to understand, before we set out on our quest.”

“Quest?”

“To find your father. He was working on a refined technology. In trials he had pushed acceptance from
fifty-five to ninety-five in a hundred; we barely lost any babes. You see, Anu, why we need to find him? If you help me, if we pull this off for the Watchmakers, for the whole of vachine-kind, then you will be saving hundreds, thousands of lives, every year. You understand?”

“You bastard.”

“Why so?”

“You have played me like a jaralga hand. I must help you. I must help end this atrocity.”

“Your father’s atrocity,” corrected Vashell.

“Yes,” she said, face ashen, voice like the tomb.

Anukis walked down long corridors of stone. She walked down long tunnels of metal. She became disorientated by it all; by the directions, the elevations, the dips and curves and banks, the smells of hot oil and cold metal. In weakness, she resigned herself. She was a puppet now, a creature to be controlled by Vashell. He had taken away her gifts, taken away her special gifts. She felt hollow. Abused. In pain. But more…she felt less than vachine, less than human, a limbo creature of neither one world or the next. She was a shadow; a shadow, mocked by shadows. Tears welled within her, but she would not let them come. No, she thought. I will be strong. Despite everything, despite my weakness, despite my abuse, I will be strong. I need my strength. I will need it as I hunt down my…father.