The Waking Engine (14 page)

“ ‘The fishes, the rocks, the waves, the ships with men in them. What stranger miracles are there?’ ”

Walter puffed his cheeks in what might have been pride and nodded— nodded to the Lady, then to himself, then withdrew. Bawl had seen odder interactions on the waterways of the City Unspoken, but never for a moment did she doubt the city’s ability to surprise her. Tam, on the other hand, rolled his eyes elaborately.

“Come, Young Tam Lin, and enjoy our hospitality,” said the Lady to Tam, and his irritation melted away. He blinked.

“Thank you, great Lady. Your graces are numberless, as are the pleasures of La Jocondette, no matter the hour or the circumstance.” He indicated the wide swath of lawn behind them but had eyes only for the Lady. “But I must return to my mistress posthaste.”

She flashed an enigmatic smile, a diamond glinting light off a hidden facet. Bawl received the impression that the Lady had as many smiles as she did clients; more than that, even.

“We’ll have the marchioness’ guest brought inside and made comfortable,” the Lady assured Tam, taking him by the arm and leading him toward the spotless structure. “And for you, the fleetest carriage.” Their feet crunched the crisp grass that grew between the flagstones of the path. The Lady continued to ignore Cooper’s body, and she and Tam disappeared into the garden, obscured by fruit trees and puffballs of blue and pink hydrangea blossoms. Bawl, her boat, and its less-than- sane crew were dismissed.

Captain Bawl made to call out after them, until she saw the purse of coins Tam had dropped beside Cooper’s head. She swiped her payment with a meaty mitt and stepped back aboard her craft, signaling to her crew to release the moorings.

“Shove off, then,” she added unnecessarily, but the female deckhand unwinding rope from the bitt merely nodded. They understood one another, captain and crew. Understood that tonight’s work, while distasteful, had been profitable. They’d all sleep with a full stomach tonight, swinging from their nets in the berth below. Death and sanity be damned.

As the barge slipped off into the night, Walter resumed his post at the fore and picked up his mad song again.

“Your flesh,” he cawed to the receding splendor of La Jocondette, “your very flesh shall be a great poem!”

Nixon squealed beneath the vise- grip of Asher’s hands, which crushed the breath from his chest and kept the boy from answering the gray man’s questions. Questions for which Nixon had no new answers—he hadn’t finked them out to the attackers, and if he had he’d surely have made himself scarce. Instead he’d been a dupe, laying on the doorstep trying to shake the wool from between his ears, nursing ribs bruised where the men had kicked when they came upon him unawares. He was trying to explain this to Asher, but the sere fool wouldn’t stop strangling him long enough to listen to Nixon’s alibi.

“Oh yes, yes!” The big man sneered, indulging his mockery of the explanation Nixon had yet to finish. “You were just casing the neighborhood, is that it? And not leading a band of armed men to our location, ‘certainly not, sir!’ ” Here Asher affected a falsetto yip that sounded nothing like the cagey urchin. “ ‘No sir, never would I squelch on a mark of such fine quality as yourself, sir!’ Is that it? Do you think I’m as green as that boy your friends dragged bleeding out of the window? Do you think us fools, is that it?”

Nixon croaked in the negative, but if Asher noticed he gave no sign. “Dead gods drowned and blazing! First you’re paid to follow me, now you lead them to our doorstep? You stupid unboy, if I’m wrong about Cooper—if Sesstri and I are wrong and he is part of this, and if you’ve led him away from me, then I will slice out your bones one by one and crack them open with my teeth.”

Sesstri laid a finger on Asher’s wrist. His eyes flickered to her face, serene despite the blood splattering one freckle-dusted cheek.

“I should like to hear his answers, if mercy provides, before you butterfly his flanks and chops for our supper.”

Asher had the good sense to look abashed, and shook his head as if to clear it. He set the boy down but kept him cornered against the entrance and the coat closet with one splayed palm.

Nixon coughed and spluttered, his world reduced to a small red weal of pain where his breath usually went. Inhale. Exhale. Why did they always have to choke him so?

“I think you can appreciate our concern.” Sesstri stood shoulder-to- shoulder with Asher, peering down her nose at the urchin. She’d spared him from an accidental strangling, but Nixon knew better than to expect anything further in the way of compassion. Christ, she was a beautiful bird, but colder than Kissinger’s teats.

“I told you fuckers, I had nothing to do with this. Why would I take one thrashing and stick around for another?” He glared at the gray man. “I just wanted my new shirt.”

“I don’t think he was involved, but not because I believe his motives are honest.” Sesstri pulled away and stalked to the windowsill still spotted with Cooper’s blood, put her hands to her head, then wrung them. “Did you see their faces?” she asked the shattered window.

“Yes.” Asher had seen the madness beyond bloodlust that boiled behind the eyes of the men who’d attacked them. It was a madness he’d seen with increasing frequency on the streets of the City Unspoken.

“Why attack here? Why not scoop Cooper up off the streets where he’d been wandering—alone—all day long?” Sesstri shot Asher an accusatory look.

“Beats me.” Nixon watched the two adults pick at the facts like carrion birds.

“Who planned this?” Asher looked at the windows, all broken when the men had swamped the house. The calligraphied wallpaper was torn and stained with blood—so much for the enchantments of ink. “Whoever did this knew when and where to strike, and that’s a precious short list of bastards.”

“They may not have expected Cooper to have been routed to the Guiselaine and abandoned.” Another look.

“I will hunt them down and cut out their hearts.” Asher pushed a half- broken pane through the casement, which splintered into the flower bed.

“Has it occurred to you that such a reaction might be precisely what our assailants sought to provoke?” A feral dog would bring down its quarry just as quickly as a trained hound—but leave little for the huntsman.

“Does it matter? Would that change what we’ve got to do next?”

“If it sends you on a rampage of evisceration, possibly. What do we do next?”

“Listen,” piped up Nixon. “If you tell me what this problem of yours is, I know a few guys—”

“—Absolutely not.” Sesstri shut him down with a palm.

“So what happens,” Asher asked, “if I’ve lost us the only lead? What happen if we fail, Sesstri? Do you even know? I don’t.”

“Comes the svarning,” quoted Sesstri, a look of realization painted across her face. “Then we will all drown.”

A beat of silence. Another. Sesstri sat motionless, a frozen dawn of fright.

Asher hesitated, uncertain how he should behave. Should he ask if she was alright? Would she cut him if he touched her shoulder? Would he begrudge paying so small a price? This woman—they faced a fate quite literally worse than extinction and the simple fact of her presence filled his head with thoughts of foxgloves and pink hair fanned across pillows.

The Dying could no longer Die, and Asher fixated on a crush. He was too old for that— an excess of years that could have been measured by the eon—and yet he couldn’t manage to feel reproachful. What’s captured her attention? Is it me?

Nixon interrupted their respective reveries with a salty curse.

“Fuck me for a Frenchman, Little Tokyo’s on fire!”

Sesstri rushed to a window. Red smoke billowed from the other side of the yellow hills. But she did not think there was fire. Bonseki-sai, the district Nixon referred to with his nonsense- speak, lay beyond those hills. That was where Sesstri had woken when she arrived in the City Unspoken; that’s where her landlady, Alouette, had found her. As absurd as it was, she did not think this a coincidence.

Tam looked as tired as he felt. Blood and mud splattered his once-tidy uniform, and he fairly wilted against the doorjamb while his mistress considered her next steps. His face was flushed from comings and goings.

“Tam, fetch my implements. This daily task grows boring, but perhaps this morning will prove unique.” Lallowë Thyu stood at the door to her study, contemplating the oak-paneled room from within the starched collar and shoulders of an overconstructed dressing gown cut from peach slipper silk; she scanned the oval library that had belonged to her husband for something out of place, missing, or secretly flawed— with an expression suggesting that at the first sign of any such offense she would have the whole room razed and rebuilt from scratch. Maybe chaparralwood-stained Terenz-de-Guises black, carved with pears and pomegranates. Maybe greenstone and jet tile.

“Implements?” Tam asked dumbly, hoping he’d heard wrong through his haze of exhaustion, although he knew perfectly well that “implements” meant only one thing—the valise packed with instruments of torture and murder that sat in the study’s small closet. The valise—pale green damask painted with tiny yellow flowers that smelled too strongly of lavender and hyssop, but not strongly enough. Tam often cleaned the blood, shit, and mangut off the tools within the valise but had never before attended his mistress while she wielded them. Those were days when Tam locked himself inside his sleeping nook and played his lute as loudly as he could to drown out the screams.

“Bring the tools I require to the second dressing room.” Stone turquoise nails tapped a staccato warning on the leather-bound tabletop. All of Lallowë’s kin grew earthen elements from their nail beds rather than keratin—elements such as rock or wood, metal ore or thorns. Family legend held that the tradition—for the protean fey, tradition often served the function that inheritable genetic traits did in human stock—had originated with Lallowë’s revered mother and queen, the Cicatrix. The last time Tam had seen the ancient queen, her once-lithe body had been sheathed in graphene and ebon polycarbonate—only her face appeared even remotely organic, though her linen-wrapped hands had sported épée-thin lancets of obsidian stone. That had been a difficult day for them all.

“Yes, ma’am.” Tam braced himself for the second dressing room and turned to leave.

As Tam scurried off to do her bidding, the marchioness let her gaze linger in the well-lit study, black bouillotte lampshades with gold-leafed inner panels cast ghosts of yellow light that almost obscured the blue dawn struggling to gladden the day. Something felt wrong to Lallowë. Not quite wrong, exactly—purgatorial, perhaps. She felt flushed, her head hurt; well, facing her father’s unflappable arrogance pained her. She hadn’t slept, that was all—a long night of tying up loose ends must have put her on edge.

Tam was waiting in the second dressing room for his mistress when she arrived, looking anywhere but toward the small door across from the entrance. The chamois-paneled room smelled of lavender and hyssop just like the valise of agony that visited it daily; its cushions were soft and plentiful, and the small door that Tam refused to see led off into a charming little confection of a privy that scared him witless.

To be fair, Tam thought, he wasn’t frightened by the room per se. Not the silver-leaf ceiling nor the white and pink dogwood blossoms on branches painted across the walls, nor the hardwood privy seat, nor the black-tiled bathing pool set into the center of the dark glass floor. No, what scared Tam was the man shackled to the wall, caked with his own filth and blood. The man was old and frail, with drooping white moustaches and Lallowë’s eyes.

Once a poet renowned across a dozen worlds, once a philosopher-king in his own right, Hinto Thyu had damned himself by choosing to pay a visit to his estranged daughter.

He’d arrived one cold morning not more than three years past, and his daughter had repaid his paternal affection with her own brand of filial concern: she’d had him body-bound and shackled and tortured to death, daily, ever since. That wasn’t unnerving to Tam, not in the least—on the contrary, it would have been out of character for a daughter of the Cicatrix to treat her human parent with anything approaching human civility, let alone warmth. No, it was the elder Thyu’s tacit acceptance of his fate that terrified Tam—each dawn Lallowë slipped into the second dressing chamber’s privy and spent the better part of the morning inventing new ways to murder her papa. And each day Hinto Thyu voiced the same request before he expired:

Tell my daughter that her father loves her.

The worst thing was, Tam thought the old man meant it.

Evidently Tam’s guess had been correct—the marchioness meant for Tam to attend her inside the privy this morning, rather than listen to the screaming muted through three rooms and four doors of blessed insulation and as much lutesong as his fingers could muster. Well, so be it. He’d lived through worse, hadn’t he? If his mistress wanted him to take a personal interest in her guests, wasn’t it his duty to accommodate her? That was his purpose, after all.

Lallowë strode into the room and crossed the distance to the privy door before Tam could blink. He picked up the wretched valise and followed the marchioness into the small enclosed space, trying to remember to breathe but shocked nevertheless by what he saw.

The night had been kind to Hinto Thyu. He was still dead when Tam slid back the doorway to admit his mistress— a ragged fringe of white hair veiling the old man’s face, the sinews of his emaciated body still in the process of stitching themselves back together. Just a few slices of flesh remained unhealed, but they no longer bled freely—he would be waking soon. Watching a body-bound corpse heal itself demanded an iron stomach—and it made Tam uncomfortable to think that a similar enchantment chained his own spirit to his body.

“Tell . . .” the old man croaked, jerking to life in midsentence; no doubt he had been repeating his message to his daughter when she slit his throat the day before. Hinto Thyu coughed and spat out a piece of his tongue. Not so dead after all. Tam oughtn’t to be surprised at that— though he’d never say so aloud, Tam saw something of the father’s resilience in the daughter. The same stubborn refusal to bend to reality—Lallowë reflected her father, but twisted and ugly as was the way of these latter-day fey. It was remarkable that there was anything of him in her at all.