The Mammoth Book of Steampunk (15 page)

“I see.” He smiled; his teeth were dark, stained with soot, or coal-dust. “I see. What makes you think I don’t have a permit, little one?”

“Don’t call me ‘little one’,” Xochipil snapped, annoyed that he’d used the same condescending name for her as the townspeople did. “My name is Xochipil.”

Tezoca spread his hands. “My apologies. What makes you think I don’t have a travel permit, Xochipil?”

Wordlessly, she pointed at the dangling amulets on his belt.

“This?” he asked, lifting one of them. In the rising sunlight, it shone as red as blood – and it wasn’t an amulet after all, she saw, but a shard with a sharp edge, barely reworked to make it seem innocuous. In its depths was an odd, cold light, a beat quite unlike the voice of the rails, speaking of a forgotten time, of altars slick with blood and the smoke of incense rising against the pristine blue of the skies, above a city that wasn’t steel and bronze, but simple adobe …

A hot, sharp pain burst across her cheek; startled, she realized Tezoca had just struck her. Warmth spread from the blow, to her face, to her bones. It wasn’t an unfamiliar feeling – Uncle Atl had been fond of calling her to order when she failed to be grateful for anything – but it was the first time a complete stranger had struck her, at all. And he wasn’t getting away with none of it, never mind that he was taller or bigger than her.

“Apologies,” Tezoca said, his gaze still on her, as if he could read her thoughts. “I had to tear you away from that.” He didn’t sound angry, or sad – just thoughtful, and perhaps a little proud, though she wasn’t sure why.

That didn’t do anything to lessen the pain. “From what?” Xochipil asked, defiantly.

He’d lowered his hands, and was now busy tucking all the shards into the folds of his cloak – hiding them from view. “I scavenged them from the desert,” he said. “They’re broken, and broken things are often more dangerous than when they’re whole.”

“I don’t understand,” Xochipil said.

“You don’t need to, believe me.” Tezoca gazed behind her, at the depths of the Well – the thrum of the steam-cars, the hubbub of workers jostling each other on the footpaths, the slow, inevitable beat coursing along the rails and resonating through the earth.

“Have they reached the bottom?” he asked.

Down, down, went the rails, vanishing into the depths of the shaft – linking Mictlan’s Well to the distant capital, and the god-machine ensconced in its palace.

“Two days ago,” Xochipil said. It had been the talk of the Well.

Tezoca smiled. “I thought so,” he said. “I felt it.”

She’d felt it, too – the deeper resonance in the rails, the richer beat that coursed along their bronze rods. Whatever it was that the god-machine was looking for, it had found it. “You’re an engineer, then?”

“No, not quite,” Tezoca said. He looked at her again, thoughtfully. “Tell me, Xochipil … if I wanted to stay somewhere that’s not the inn, where would I go?”

“So you don’t have a travel permit,” she said, with a touch of satisfaction.

“Of course not,” Tezoca replied, airily.

“And why would I help you?” she asked carefully. “The penalties for aiding fugitives aren’t light.”

Tezoca smiled. “I’m not a fugitive. And I could offer you money, but I doubt that’s what you really want, is it? Very well.” He pulled out one of the obsidian shards, and rubbed it absentmindedly. “Do you like the god-machine, Xochipil?”

Even the question was sacrilege – her hands reached out, sketched the Sign of the Sacred Cog, to ward against the wrath of the machine. “What kind of question is that?” she asked.

Tezoca hadn’t moved. “Humour me.”

“Do I like the god-machine? Why would I have to? It sees everything and punishes everything. It is, was and will ever be, throughout the ages of the world.”

“It wasn’t always,” Tezoca said, very softly.

Xochipil glanced around, suddenly frightened. A fugitive was one thing; a heretic quite another. The townspeople tolerated her, but this would be going too far. “The Change was so long ago we don’t remember it,” she said. “What does it change, if the machine wasn’t always?”

“Things that are born can die,” Tezoca said, with a quick nod of his head. “Let me ask you the question again. Do you like the engineers, the technicians, the soldiers? Do they treat you well?”

Xochipil shook her head – once, twice. What right had he, to come here in the midst of her life, and question everything? “You know what the leg would have meant, before the Change. I have a life, under the god-machine.”

“So do caged birds. Answer the question.”

“Machine break you,” she whispered. “You know the answer, don’t you?” That she was lame, and thus had no place on any of the work crews; that she’d survived on the “kindness” of relatives until they grew bored and left her to fend for herself; that she scavenged for broken tech at the edge of the Well, the small, useless artefacts that passing steam-cars thoughtlessly discarded – and sold them, day after day, barely eking out her living.

“Perhaps I do know the answer. But I’d want it from your own mouth.”

“No,” she said, low and savage, the word out of her lips before she could take it back. She waited for him to laugh, to throw back his cloak and reveal himself as a servant of the machine, to take her away for heresy. But he did nothing. He merely watched her.

At length Tezoca nodded. “You have a fiery heart,” he said, his hand rubbing the shard, again and again, as if he could wear it down to nothing.

“And you’re a madman.”

Tezoca smiled. “That’s often been said. But you haven’t answered my question.”

The earlier one, the one about lodgings and food. Still shaking inwardly – remembering the shock of his question, the shock of her answer – that she, Xochipil, the daughter of workers, should question the god-machine, that she should imply she’d gladly see it stop functioning …

She shook her head angrily. Why not, after all? It had never been much of a life. “I have a room. It’s not much – upper levels, not much surface – but it could stretch to two people.”

Again, that quick smile of his, daring and reckless, revealing the darkness of his teeth. “That will do nicely, I think.”

Luckily, they didn’t have to go far: Xochipil’s assigned room was one of the dingiest ones, just under the mouth of the Well. The best rooms were near the bottom, as close as possible to the edge of the rails and the source of the endless thrumming. That was where the supervisors lived; and the governor, and all his staff of master engineers and elite soldiers.

She left Tezoca there to unfold his belongings in the cramped room, its wrought ceiling so low he had to bend to stand under it, its shelves covered in scraps of metal and empty vials in addition to her clothes and tools.

She had no doubt he’d wander around, but she had other things to do: it was almost time for the noon pause, and Malli would be ready to do business. Hastily wrapping some of her better findings in her bag, she hurried onto the filigreed walkway that led back to the main path – and then down along the footpaths.

Above and below her pulsed the rails, plunging into the dizzying darkness below the surface. Steam-cars loaded with tools and bags of excavated soil slid past, with a whine like air through a cut throat. Further down were the subsidiaries of the machine scooping out the earth, and the men and women toiling to lay down the bronze rods for the new rails.

A faint light oozed from the bottom of the shaft – a shimmering, pulsing radiance that was achingly comforting – and the beat of the rails was stronger, richer, echoing in her lame leg and in her chest, squeezing around her heart until it seemed to be one with her.

She wondered what they’d found, down there; what Tezoca was really looking for.

She found Malli on the twenty-fifth level, sitting a little apart from her work cadre. The rotund woman barely raised her eyes when Xochipil slid next to her, onto the warm metal of the bench. “What have you got?” she asked, without preamble.

Xochipil unpacked her things, laid them out on her knees. Malli scrutinised them for a while. Xochipil tensed, expecting the usual session of bargaining, but Malli merely pointed to two of the less broken artefacts, a filigreed hummingbird and a rusty cog.

“Those two. Three
tlazos
.”

Xochipil, surprised, pocketed the money without showing what she felt. Malli wrapped the artefacts in her own shirt, finished her crushed maize and amaranth, and got up. “Do you have urgent business?” Xochipil asked.

Malli tossed her head disdainfully. “There’s a hierarch there, Xochipil. From the god-machine itself.” Her eyes shone with excitement; and clearly she wouldn’t understand why Xochipil didn’t rejoice.

Mictlan’s Well was not so big or so important to warrant regular visits from the capital. “What does he want?” Xochipil asked. She thought, with a sinking in her stomach, of Tezoca methodically unpacking his things in her room. But a hierarch wouldn’t visit that high: they’d be lodging with the governor’s staff at the bottom, near the heart of the Well.

“Are you daft?” Malli asked. “We’ve reached the bottom, girl! Of course he’d want to see what’s there.”

“You too?” Xochipil asked.

Malli looked at Xochipil as if she’d just offered to worship the old gods. “He’s a hierarch! Of course he’s holding a grand procession, and a remembering.”

And of course, everyone would want to attend it, to be touched by the god-machine’s essence – to feel the unending communion with the rest of the Commonwealth: with the network of towns and mines and wells connected by the beat of the rails and the whine of steam-cars, and with the thousand cadres of workers toiling away in the bowels of the machine’s subsidiaries, ceaselessly raising bronze and copper and chrome to its undying glory.

Xochipil realized with a shock that Malli was waiting for her – caring little about her outcast status – and there was no way she could refuse, not without both vexing Malli and raising suspicions she couldn’t afford to raise.

“All right,” she said. “Let’s go.”

Xochipil had never been to the lower floors, but somehow she wasn’t surprised to find them made of chrome and steel: white and shining in the harsh light from sunspheres, still thrumming with the beat of the rails, an echo so strong it was almost paralyzing.

She kept her head high, ignoring the odd looks the various work crews threw at her – a cripple, here in the centre of the Well, an unthinkable thing if ever there was one – and walked slightly behind Malli, unwilling to draw closer. Malli herself hadn’t shown any desire for friendship; just a wish for her to join with the god-machine.

They were almost at the bottom of the Well now. The reverberation shook Xochipil’s bones and her muscles, echoed in her ribcage like a second heartbeat. They wouldn’t be going all the way down, though: Xochipil was sure that the hierarch wouldn’t show the workers what lay on the last floor. It was the supervisors who had dug the last pit, and the governor himself who had broken the last seal and connected the last rails.

On the vast platform that filled most of the shaft at the Eightieth Level, a dizzying array of cadres had gathered. Every one of them wore their own colours and badges of allegiance, a dizzying sea of drab cotton and maguey-fibre clothes. The platform near the centre held a steel altar with the Sacred Symbols: the Cog, the Chain, the Bolt, the Wires and the Vial.

On the platform stood the hierarch.

He was alone: a tall, unprepossessing silhouette in flowing robes of stark whiteness, bearing a symbol Xochipil couldn’t make out. But even standing away from the platform, even wedged between the resentful members of Malli’s cadre on the narrow footpath, she could
feel
the strength of his presence, the aura that somehow was the pulsing of every city of the Commonwealth – and the mind of the god-machine, straining towards the bottom of the Well, extending itself along the length of the rails to be with them in this moment of great glory.

The hierarch raised his head, and silence spread across the cavern. His skin was gleaming copper – and his hands extended towards them all, the hands of the god-machine, which was, had been and would be, forever and ever in this age of the world and the next and the next.

“Behold,” the hierarch whispered, a single word that echoed against the walls of the shaft, quivering in the rails themselves, twisting in Xochipil’s chest until her heart ached with need. “The Age of Wonders has come. Let the old gods remain dead, let the altars be of pristine steel, let the blood and the breath remain in our bodies …” A litany, whispered over and over – and abruptly Xochipil realized the rumble was the sound of thousands of voices joining it – of her own voice, raised in praise of the god-machine and the Commonwealth, but she couldn’t stop, she was as much a part of it as Malli, as the hierarch …

“Let the sun remain silent, let our prayers be made with forges and furnaces, let the blood and the breath remain in our bodies …”

The words were said, over and over, thousands of voices filling the Well to bursting – and even the memory of Tezoca was very far away, words that made no sense, for how could he ever hope to challenge such power as this – how could he put an end to what was, would be and had ever been?

“Let the pyramids remain broken, let our labour be our worship, let the blood and the breath remain in our bodies …”

Pyramids. Tezoca had said—

He—

Abruptly, her mind torn from the communion, she saw Tezoca. He was standing on the edge of the crowd on one of the neighbouring footpaths, dressed in the colours of the Fifty-Fourth Hummingbird Cadre. He held a dark-skinned woman in his embrace, kissing her lips, her forehead, her earlobes – and the voice of the god-machine was receding in the distance, replaced by Tezoca’s mocking words.

It wasn’t always. Things that are born can die
.

Tezoca raised his gaze to Xochipil, pulling away from the woman; and in the split moment before he did, she saw, very clearly, the blood still clinging to his lips, the blood still flowing from the woman’s earlobes, wounds that sealed themselves even as she watched.

Blood. He’d been … drinking blood, and using it to work against the machine’s communion. But only one kind of being had ever fed on blood, and only one kind of being had ever drawn power from it.