The Waking Engine (11 page)

Companions, then, if friends was too strong a word. Coconspirators. Mutually fucked. Outside, Nixon napped on the threshold stone, his head against the door. Fucked seemed to be a hot commodity in the City Unspoken.

Sesstri’s falcon gaze found him again. She’d been drinking heavily too, though it didn’t show, and she seemed to have made up her mind about something. With careful little steps she sat down next to him. Quick, like a raptor.

“This city is nameless,” she confided, leaning toward Cooper. “You know by now that it is one of a very few places in the whole of everywhere that True Death is possible—maybe even the first such place. Maybe the last. Beings come here from every corner of the metaverse to Die. It was once beautiful, so long ago that no one living remembers, but is now ruined.”

“How did I get here?” Cooper felt his belly beneath his shirt. She and Asher shared a guilty look.

“We don’t know.” Asher lifted up his arms. “There are powers that can intervene. Things that call themselves gods, but we’ve no evidence of that.”

Asher lounged like a dancer in the window, gray ropes of muscle in repose while fire filled the horizon. Again Cooper saw the towers there, north and west of the Dome’s moonlight; skyscrapers of steel and glass stood among more fantastic spires, fluted marble, pitted limestone. Some were ablaze, their tops lit like candles although they never fell. Something about towers that burned but stood both reminded Cooper of home and made him mourn his city.

And again, when he looked at the towers, he heard crying. Screaming and crying.

“What you said about false gods,” he asked softly. “What does that mean, really?”

Sesstri braced her hands on her knees. “It is crucial that you listen to me and understand what I’m telling you: worship gods at your own peril. There are beings beyond the scope of your understanding, yes. There are the First People, who came before us; they are powers that may be kind, or foul, or capricious, and many would have you believe that they are gods. But just because a mind is older and wiser and even greater than yours does not make it divine. This is a secret that the vast majority of sentient beings seem incapable of apprehending. There are mighty spirits, entities, forces that clothe themselves in the trappings of the infinite, but if there exists an all-pervading omniscience—a truly divine light—I have seen no sign of it.” She hesitated, tapping a finger slowly against her plum lips. “And I have looked.” AndLookedAndLooked.

Asher slumped against the window frame, kissing the frost off his glass. “If anyone could find evidence of the divine,” he slurred, “it would be Miss Manfrix.” He stared blankly out the window, following Cooper’s gaze. “She’s very . . . thorough.”

“You’re still bitter I lied to you.” Sesstri said a bit more gently than Cooper had come to expect.

Asher made a rude noise. “Not at all, my lovely. I’m bitter because you won’t go to bed with me.”

“How common a reaction,” she said absently, though Cooper could have tightrope-walked across the tension. “I thought your breeding was better than that.”

“Breeding!” Asher brayed, still facing the windowpane. “Breeding? Bells, woman, breeding is just a fancy way of saying a man is well-trained enough to wipe down and pull up his pants before his wife walks in and sees the tailor’s daughter down on her knees, with her lips open and her hair all mussed and sexed-like, in that tight little stomacher and that scandalous cleavage erupting all over the place, looking so plump and willing and, well, kind of juicy. . . .” He sighed, collecting himself. “That’s breeding.”

“You’re drunk,” she answered. “Go to bed.” YourBed MyBed.

He ignored her and turned to Cooper with a conspiratorial wink. “There are two things every man who sees Sesstri Manfrix knows straight away. The first is that she is the most beautiful woman he will ever see. The second is that he has no chance whatsoever to make babies with her.” He giggled drunkenly into his glass, then shrugged to himself and burped.

Sesstri seemed unfazed. In fact, she nodded. A miniscule nod, like she knew he was right but was uninterested in her own beauty, even bored by it.

“So why were you looking for this shaman guy?” Cooper asked the room, eager to change the subject.

Asher drew himself upright, suddenly very sober. “Before all this began,” he said, his varicolored eyes locked with Cooper’s, “I had trained myself never to remember my dreams. Now I am plagued by them, and they are full of the restless Dying.” Cooper nodded. “The release they seek here . . . it has become more difficult for them to attain. The passage of pilgrims through the city has been stymied, and our streets fill with those who have lived past their due. This . . . this is more than a problem of overpopulation. Without True Death, the metaverse itself grinds to a halt, like gears without oil. There is a . . . sickness, I suppose, and as it spreads it will affect everyone. So I tried to find someone, anyone, to help us, and I failed, and here we are.”

Cooper nodded. “The svarning. That guy who came after us in the Guiselaine, that’s what he said. And the old minnow at the applestory, she said it too.”

“Winnowed. Apostery.” Sesstri spoke slowly but deliberately, “Yes. Well . . . Well. I see everyone knows about the svarning, and not a clue what to do about it or even when it will erupt, as plagues do.” She looked away. “In any case, the prince has been rather absent these last few years. Someone has to look after the city.”

The confusion must have been clear upon Cooper’s face, because Sesstri clarified immediately. “In theory, the city is governed by the prince, though individual precincts are administered by the families of the Circle Unsung, the ruling council of nobility. But some time ago the prince shut them all away inside the Dome, his capitol. Again, no one knows why. He has chosen to abandon his responsibilities, perhaps . . .” Her voice trailed off. She sat staring into her glass.

Asher was quiet for a moment, then shook his head as if clearing his thoughts. He smiled.

“This has been quite an eve ning,” he said jovially. “We’ll sleep now, and seek answers in the morning. We may not be able to heal the universe, but maybe we can find some help for our new friend, Cooper the erratum.”

Cooper’s head was spinning by this point, looped on insanity and bitter liquor. He knocked his tumbler down on the table—hard—and it echoed like the pounding of a gavel.

A yelp from outside broke the silence.

Glass shattered and Sesstri screamed. The shadows of men appeared at the windows, then climbed into the room, and Asher leapt to action; he became a whirl of smoke that streamed to a bay window and brought down two men in brown leather smocks, their heads smashing together with a satisfying crunch.

Cooper sat up in alarm but found himself paralyzed. There wasn’t time to be frightened, but for all his determination to wrap his head around the events of the day, his death and its subsequent repeal, the tale of the city and the worlds and lives upon lives, Cooper had no instinct for dealing with violence.

Sesstri and Asher had no such limitations. Asher continued to fell men in a blur of gray skin and twirling rags, while Sesstri had knives in each hand and stood like a pink and yellow- silk valkyrie with her back against the stairs, etching a sphere of safety into the air around herself with the flurry of her blades. One of her assailants fell back, clutching his guts as they slipped out of a sudden gash. Were those kitchen knives or daggers? Was she prepared to eviscerate men at a moment’s notice?

Cooper found the good sense to jump behind the sofa in which he’d been sitting and tried to hide, but in doing so realized that he’d exhausted his combat training. Asher’s right, he thought, I really am helpless. But I can flag down a mean cab.

More men streamed in, and Asher became a rush of doves beating wings against a storm, his hands and elbows and feet his only weapons, pale blades of bone and skin that danced violent and dangerous at the head of the sudden incursion. Blood flew from the faces of the men who swarmed him. They were pulling themselves through other windows now, and someone kicked down the door with a smash.

“Cooper!” Sesstri called. “To me! Upstairs, now!”

More men stormed in from the kitchen, distracting Asher and Sesstri both. Cooper moved toward the stairs, but not quickly enough. A hand clamped down on his mouth from behind and Cooper fell against the wall, hitting his head hard. He felt more hands lift his body and saw the starry sky for a moment as they passed him through a broken window, then the pain in his head swamped his thoughts and sleep came to Cooper at last.

In times now past, which the historians of the nobility called ancient times but were, in fact, closer to recent events than anything resembling ancient, the people of the Guiselaine paid a bone tithe to the lords who kept them safe, employed, and fed. The governances of other districts had employed similar policies, but the Guiselaine had always been a populous and prosperous territory, and its maze-tight streets and deep, narrow canals relatively dangerous to maintain; the resulting coin-to-calcium ratio was fairly steep, or shallow, depending upon one’s point of view.

If that view happened to be from the nave of the ossuary beneath the manse Terenz-de-Guises, one might think all the currency and corpses were worth the tithing, especially if one happened to be Lallowë Thyu. The marchioness breezed down the stairs onto a tweed parquet resembling the floor above, only made of finger bones: carpals and phalanges met her bare feet at perfect angles, and Lallowë gripped the floor with her toes, letting herself pretend for a moment that she walked across the floor of woven, living wood that rimmed the Court of Scars.

Through the nave, Lallowë padded her way past pillars of femur and humerus, designed to lean into the midline like rows of trees, branching somewhere past two-thirds of their height to honor the Golden Mean and support narrow hyperboloid archways that formed at the junction of almost conical ceiling vaults built steeply with pubis and skull. At the apex of each dome dangled a ring of baby rib cages, the bone fine as lace, within which enchanted lights hung like glowing fruit, painting the ceiling and floors in the colors of nature: sunny, leafy, wildfire-ruddy. Between the blooming lights and the dappled floor, a forest of yellow bone welcomed its most recent mistress.

Even this world could be a beautiful place, she thought, if one kept the proper perspective. And disposed of the ugliness— as she was more than happy to do.

Lallowë came to a stop at an apse lit in green, resting her hands on the flat waist of her wide-bottomed trousers; she rubbed her bare arms and wished she’d brought a smock to protect her blouse— blood spattered the bones, looking black in the green light, and Tam raised a blood-drenched face from the remains of a torso, nodding his head at the marchioness.

“Ma’am,” he said, hiding his exhaustion as best he could. There was marrow in his hair, dripping onto his cheek like spittle or semen.

The remains of a man were scattered about the apse, but his trunk stood upright, impaled upon a steel spike. In a far corner, hidden from the green light, a statue of a young girl leaned against the wall of bones. The statue bore more than a passing resemblance to Lallowë, and appeared to be carved from cherrywood.

“Ah? I have butchered the butcher, ma’am,” Tam announced, returning Lallowë’s attention to the corpse. “And immersed the device in his organ, as you requested.”

She nodded. “Pull it out.” Let us see what heartsblood reveals.

Tam made a face and obeyed. He held the golden oval in his goredrenched hand.

Lallowë peered over him but made no move to touch the thing herself. True enough, fresh heartsblood revealed an unseen pattern of fine lines that crisscrossed the surface of the thing: circuitry. And one thing else besides. “There’s a hint of a groove along the side—I believe it’s a catch. Do you see?”

“I . . . I think so, ma’am.” Tam had mortal eyes, and had to squint.

“Open it,” she hissed, her mood slipping from appreciative to impatient—always mercurial, a restless serpent.

Gold light shined off the thing in his palm. “It looks like a jeweled paperweight,” he said, brushing fox-red hair from his perfect, defiled face. “Milady is certain that the bibelot in question . . . opens?”

Thyu nodded, showing as always just a whisper more patience for foxfaced Tam than for any other servant—he was a great beauty and could please her with his tongue, when she chose to be pleased. “I’m certain of it now . . . something is inside. Can’t you hear it?”

Inside? Tam nearly dropped the precious machine.

“Oh, give it here.” The marchioness plucked the device from her valet’s palm and traced its outline with a filed turquoise nail.

“I heard something when I touched it, yes ma’am, though I’m not certain it was . . .” Tam looked relieved to be rid of the device. He sighed. “Beware unfamiliar magics,” Tam cautioned before he could stop himself. It was faerie logic, and good advice besides. Unless your advisee was the Marchioness Terenz-de-Guises, in which case the best advice was to keep your pretty mouth shut if you wanted to remain inside your skin. Tam half-expected to see her forked tongue lash out and punish him for using his own, and steeled himself.

But his mistress didn’t reprimand his impertinence, being mesmerized by the marvel in her hand. Lallowë peered more closely at its faces, at the ultrafine etching of parallel lines that branched and reconnected, capillary channels filled with blood.

“This is not magic,” she breathed, admiring the alien filigree. “At least, not chiefly. There are principles at work here that neither you nor I have seen before till recently—this device produces an electrical current. It also emanates a most unusual vibration that has perplexed me.”

“Magic vibration?” Tam asked a little foolishly. Old habits.

“Oh no. Can’t you hear it, Tam?” whispered the marchioness, tracing a deeper groove along the back of the device. “The screaming?”

Like the catch of a jewelry box, the top half of the bauble popped open. It shocked her finger at the same instant, discharging energy that numbed her hand.