The Waking Engine (15 page)

“Tell my daughter . . .” he began again, but never finished. Lallowë glided across the chamber—skirting the gore-filled bathing pool brewing rot in the center of the floor—and slapped the words from her father’s mouth.

“No more of that, Papa,” she almost whispered, stroking her father’s cheek where her turquoise nails had drawn blood. “We’ve heard quite enough about your feelings.”

“If only that could be true, Lolly.” Hinto Thyu matched his daughter’s gentle tone. “I don’t believe you’ve truly heard a word about love in your whole impoverished life.”

A second slap rang off the silvered walls of the privy. Tam stared unflinchingly at the dogwoods painted on the silver walls.

“Drivel. Drivel, doggerel, and defamation, that’s all you’ve ever been capable of, Papa. If you call me by that insulting diminutive a second time, I’ll have you bled dry again.” That had been a long week, Tam remembered, thinking of the howls that had faded day by day into awful silence. And the faces of the laundresses who’d had to bleach a week’s worth of bloody washrags. Exsanguinations were no holiday.

Lallowë held up something for her father to see: the gold device she’d spent so much time examining since she’d opened it, deactivating it in the process. Bits of dried dragonfly wing still stuck to its inner shell.

“What’s this, another bauble for the jewel of my heart?” The old man smiled through a mouthful of broken teeth. “You have so many lovely things.”

“Something more. Something less, too, now that I’ve opened it. But I think, Papa, that you already knew that.” She shook her head as if to clear it, and Tam wondered, not for the first time, about Lallowë Thyu’s state of mind. These escapades didn’t seem to satisfy her as once they had.

Hinto Thyu almost smiled. “I know only the enormity of my own ignorance, poppet. Mine and yours.”

“Of course you do. Philosophical gibberish aside, Papa, I believe that you recognize this device, or at least the principles of its design.” She lifted the lid with a nail to show him the remains of the dragonfly. Did the old man flinch? How his daughter wanted to wound him. How she’d tried. “A beautiful machine powered by an insect. Much like Mother’s womb must have felt after you seeded it with me.”

“Yes, yes. I am small and insignificant. I am less than nothing.”

“Truer words, never spoken.” Lallowë sat on a tall stool and crossed her legs at the knee.

“Which begs the question: what are you?”

Lallowë twitched a devastating eyebrow.

But Hinto just shrugged, as best he could hanging from manacles. “Ah, you are greater than I will ever be, lotus of my loin. Perhaps you are embarrassed to have such a nobody for a father?”

Lallowë rested her hands in her lap and fixed her father with a searching look. “I’ll be honest with you, Father: for the last three years I’ve been trying to decide the answer to that very question. Why indeed would I spend a moment’s thought on the jumped-up minstrel du jour that Mother tapped for a seed donor? What possessed me to spare a single thought for a discarded stud horse that didn’t even merit a proper expulsion from Mother’s court?

“But in the last few days I’ve learned something, Papa, which explains the remarkable aptitude of my foresight. I’ve learned that great things can be fueled by the least significant of lives.” She slipped the dragonfly corpse from its golden coffin and dangled it before her father’s eyes.

“Yes,” he agreed. “As your great rage has been fueled by mine. My least significant life.”

No response. The wings of the erstwhile insect danced in the exhalations from Lallowë’s flared nostrils. Tam watched blood dry on dogwood petals.

“Maybe I’ve misbehaved, Papa.” She considered, inspecting the play of light across her turquoise nails. “Instead of tickling you with my steel feathers here, maybe you’d prefer to play the audience while I round up some innocents to tickle instead? Since you don’t feel like talking, perhaps I could inspire you to write a new folio of verse? Pain informs art, I’m told. Yes, let’s drag in a babe to torture instead. You may watch.”

Hinto Thyu sagged further into his chains. “I’ll tell you what you want to know, Lolly, but not because I’m moved by your tantrums. I’ll tell you because you are my daughter and I love you; I will always love you, no matter how you deform your heart.”

“Fabulous.” She dismissed him with a wave of her hand. If his words affected her, she did not show it, instead shaking the broken cabochon in her father’s face and demanding, “Now what is this?”

“It’s called a ‘vivisistor,’ poppet, and it produces an electric current derived from the slow death of the living thing trapped inside it.”

“That is its function. Vivisistor.” She tasted the word. “What is its significance?”

“What’s significant about generating power from life? Oh poppet, you ask all the right questions, but in the wrong order. You should feel horror where you feel only ambition, and I worry that if you do not feel it now at the beginning as you should, then you will feel it at the last, when it is too late for you to save yourself, and that breaks my worthless heart.” Tam thought the old man looked as if he meant it. He seemed sincere, at least.

Lallowë hissed through her teeth. “Don’t fence with me now that you’ve begun to cooperate, Papa; we’re past that. There’s nothing remarkable about a battery, no matter how it generates current. There’s more to this ‘vivisistor’ than electricity, and I want to know what it is.”

“ ‘I want, I want, I want.’ That’s all you know. It’s my fault, I suppose, for not supplementing your mother’s instruction with a modicum of the decency that is your human birthright.” He drew breath to continue, but his daughter denied him the opportunity.

The third slap stung Lallowë’s palm, and Hinto Thyu was not so quick to raise his head this time. When he did, their matching eyes met and neither gave an inch of ground.

“Do you feel better?” he asked her, very softly. “Does hurting me lessen the burden of your pain, my darling girl? If it does, I will gladly dangle here forever.”

Lallowë cursed in faerie-tongue, obscene birdsong chiming the air. “Why do you torment me?” she demanded, a thread of shrillness in her voice betraying the girl she must once have almost been. “And where did Mother find it?”

Hinto Thyu looked down at his tortured carcass. He tried to shrug, but his brutalized muscles wouldn’t permit it. “Because I am a terrible father, I suppose.” Then, tears in his failing eyes, he broke.

“Your mother uncovered the technology de cades ago, shortly before the troubles with Death began.” He paused, watching his daughter’s face. Tam could not imagining feeling anything but fear for Lallowë Thyu, but this man only ever offered love. Did he know how that would torture her? Was the father as cruel, in his way, as the child?

“ ‘Troubles with Death.’ So you know about that, do you?” It was a cheap question—anyone paying half a mind to the foot traffic in the City Unspoken would notice that the ranks of the Dying swelled daily. But no one seemed to be paying half a mind these days; there was a frantic energy, a distraction in the air.

Hinto kept quiet, though his face looked woeful. Three years of dying daily, he’d kept his secrets. Tam did not think that Hinto Thyu would ever spill them all.

Lallowë pressed a nail against the thin skin above her father’s collarbone, hard enough to draw blood. “I knew you knew more than you let on, but not why. Why do you know so much, Papa? Did Mother tell you this, so long ago, before you left us?”

Her father looked at the floor when he answered, staring down at his own blood, both dried and fresh. “I don’t hate your mother, Lallowë. I don’t wish her harm—that, and I worry that the harm will not be limited to the Cicatrix alone. Please murder me again, but promise me that when the moment comes, you will save yourself.”

She promised him nothing but pain, and kept her word. The old man bellowed.

“You’re leaving something out.” Lallowë brushed his whis kers, now, mimicking tenderness as best she could. “Keep your sources if you’d rather scream than sing, but tell me what you know of the devices. Finish this.”

“The vivisistor combines several arcane disciplines with some technological fields that should not be compatible with one another, let alone with spellwork. Perhaps you might meditate further upon the implications of such a feat.”

“Perhaps I might do, but I’d consider it a courtesy if my Papa would finish the bedtime tale he’s begun.” She picked his skin out from beneath her bright nails.

Hinto sobbed and it seemed as though all the strength drained out of his body and into the cesspool at his feet. “I would expect no less from my darling girl. If I tell you that the vivisistors are nothing new, but something very old, and exceedingly dangerous, will you abandon your mother’s madness? I think not. And what if I tell you that the magics and sciences combined within the vivisistor seem to arise from disparate universes? Will you see reason and leave the folly of ancient madness to proper fools?”

Lallowë’s eyes opened wide. “Mother works with technology from multiple realities? Successfully?”

Hinto nodded imperceptibly. “Multiple realities, yes. Successfully? Well that, as always, depends on your definition.”

“Oh Papa,” she breathed, considering the ramifications of successful duplication and integration of technology from several worlds at once. Tech from one world rarely worked on another—and conflicting magic systems could be even worse. Syncretistic innovation, truly building upon the resources of the metaverse—that kind of synthesis had always been deemed a myth. Even in places like the City Unspoken, where worlds mixed on the streets.

“Your mother . . .” The old bard’s voice was hoarse. “You don’t have to become her, Lolly. There are as many possible futures as there are skies sheltering suns. Even the Cicatrix was beautiful, once, like a bower of daffodils. You remember her, don’t you? Before the scars. Before derangement, before she changed her name. Before the vivisistors she had installed within her own body.”

Lallowë turned her head as her face crumpled. “Oh, oh, oh.” Now was her turn to sob. The manacle on Tam’s wrist burned like fire.

“I thought you might appreciate the unlikelihood of such an achievement.”

But Lallowë just wrung her hands. “Oh,” she repeated to herself, “Oh, Mother, what have you done?” Tam pictured the transformation of a beautiful faerie inserting perversions like this vivisistor inside her own body, eggs unborn into a monster’s abdomen. Little wonder their womb magic faltered.

“Lolly . . .” Hinto Thyu began, seeming to hope he’d breached her defenses and touched the girl he’d known.

But Lallowë blinked rapidly, squared her shoulders, and was again the indomitable Marchioness Terenz-de-Guises, icy and unflappable. The queen’s body would be precisely where she’d want the most powerful technology and the most monstrous of violations. Tam had hoped that they might be done with this unpleasantness, after Lallowë’s papa had yielded so many details about the vivisistors, but it seemed they’d only just begun.

“Mother’s plans extend beyond her own amendments, I’ll wager. And I’ll wager twice as much that Papa’s learned how. Tam, assemble the seven-gauge exsanguinator process.” She was going to bleed him dry.

“Mistress?” Tam stalled, having beached himself on his long- submerged humanity at last. He couldn’t, he just couldn’t. Besides, the old man had already told her what she wanted to know, hadn’t he? Tam couldn’t, but he would.

“You should know better than anyone that coaxing a bird to sing is only the first step of the work, my Young Tam Lin. Now we must teach it the melodies we wish to hear.”

As dawn broke over the lip of the bowl of black land that was the Bonsekisai district, Sesstri feared that Nixon had been right. Billows of bright red smoke looped up into the blue morning behind the great tree that rose from the center of the neighborhood. It looked like smoke, but was too red. Sesstri had a growing feeling in her gut that she’d missed something terribly obvious, and it all began with the color red. More damningly for the would-be- smoke, this was Bonseki-sai. Strange things happened in Bonseki-sai. Sesstri had awoken here, found by her scarlet-haired landlady. She hadn’t returned since.

In Bonseki-sai, every building had been incorporated into a district- wide work of stagecraft, so Sesstri and Nixon hurried past blocks that rose and crested like stormy seas, miniature mountain peaks that were inns or coffee shops, and countless confabulations of succulents that grew larger here than they did anywhere else.

“Why are we running toward the fire, bird?” Nixon asked, out of breath. “It’s not a fire.” Sesstri had decided that much. “It’s not even smoke.” The suns— suns, plural, today, bright and blue—raised themselves just high enough in the sky to send slanting rays of sunlight streaming behind them. Bonseki-sai at sunrise: it should have been a lovely sight, but was instead a horror.

The black ground beneath their feet caught the angled light and was transformed by it—the dawn lit the turf like a jewel, and revealed the matte black surface to be translucent like honey-dark resin, murky but clear enough to see what lay below: countless bodies, floating as if drowned, preserved forever, mere inches underfoot.

Far below the imprisoned dead, the drowned streets of an elder, previous district lay beneath fathoms of the resinous substance, visible only at dawn and dusk, shadowy blocks and buried towers stretching up toward Sesstri’s feet like huge fingers, drowned forever ago.

“Have you ever met one of the First People, Nixon?” Sesstri asked, determined not to look down.

“Have I—woah!” Nixon squealed and threw himself sideways, rolling onto a low red fence and clinging to it as if his life depended on it. “What happened to the ground?”

Sesstri stopped and closed her eyes.

“I hearda this but, shit, I never wanted to see it for myself.” Nixon sounded scared, but awe crept into his voice as he mastered the feeling of vertigo brought on by the dawn-lit streets of Bonseki-sai. “Poor bastards.” He set his feet down upon the amber ground, scraping the toes of one foot above the milky-eyed face of a dead man, whose mouth gaped forever in a wordless scream.