The Waking Engine (3 page)

“This is sickness,” he choked from his knees, “how could they not be my first thought? This is sick, sick, sick.” He looked up at Asher, stringyhaired and chisel-faced, the piss-colored sky going blue behind him. Quicksilver clouds gathered, not minding the schizophrenic heavens above them. “Can’t you see how sick this is, or are you too dead to notice?”

The colorless man closed his eyes and took a breath. “There are sicknesses. Living is not one of them.” He fixed Cooper with a tight-jawed expression. Asher’s false levity had fled.

Cooper stood up, wiped his eyes and crossed his arms like an obstinate child. Despite the death and deathlessness, despite the bloodslut’s impermanent murder, he found himself. Despite the background noise of fears murmuring in his head as people passed. “Explain. Now. I can deal, if I know.” Cooper leaned against a wall so ancient its bricks had crumbled into little pockets for weeds and moss. “Am I really dead or only dreaming? I feel awake, but . . . Am I in a coma? Is this some kind of fucked up comaland? Sesstri says I’m dead. Are you dead? What’s with the urban purgatory? What’s with the—”

“Okay, okay.” Asher held up his hands in defeat as a meatmonger glared at them, two jackadays blocking her passage through the narrow lane. “Walk with me, and let this nice woman get on with her deliveries.” Cooper thought Asher wanted to flee.

A cart filled with wrapped bundles dripped watery blood as it trundled past. Its minder cleared her throat in disapproval. He looked at the butchered meat and considered his body, lifeless and cold somewhere so far away that distance wasn’t even the proper metric.

“On . . . on Earth we don’t . . . we don’t wake up after we die.” It sounded so stupid, so utterly unhelpful.

“Earth?” Asher crowed. “You named your home after dirt?”

“Hey, fuck you.” Cooper frowned. “You’re supposed to be filling me in, not attacking my cultural heritage. The afterlife is hard enough as it is.”

“What’s after life?” Asher asked, sincerely, indicating a trio of passing shoppers laden with brightly colored bags, who turned up their noses. “There’s only life.”

“That doesn’t make any sense,” said Cooper, his bewilderment starting to burn into anger. That was good— anger he could handle, anger was familiar. “If I lived, and I died, then this place—whatever it is—must be the afterlife. It’s after my life, isn’t it?”

“No! Blessed batshit bells, it’s just the beginning; that’s what I’m trying to show you.” Asher screwed up his face as if choosing his next words carefully. “You live and you live and you live, and one day, maybe, if you’re lucky, you get to stop.”

“I just don’t believe it. I can’t. You and Sesstri, you say that whenever someone dies, they just . . . wake up somewhere else?” Cooper grimaced and imagined a hundred wakings like he’d had today. A thousand. “Are . . . are you dead too?”

Asher scoffed. “I’m older than dirt.”

How could Asher be so cavalier about something so revelatory, Cooper tried to understand. Then again, if what he said was true, who wouldn’t be jaded by a thousand thousand weekdays?

“And then they die again and wake up somewhere new, again and again and again?”

“Most of ’em. Most of the time.” Asher’s face flickered with a frown before his mask of gray cool reassembled itself. He held his arms against his ribs in an uncomfortable-looking way for just a moment longer, taking deep breaths. Cooper realized that this was hard for him, too.

“Right.” Cooper scrubbed his face with his palms. “Except the bloodslut, she stays here.”

Asher nodded. “Correct.”

The dam burst and Cooper’s questions erupted without pause: “Do we all go to the same places? What happens if we don’t want to start all over again? Why did I wake up with my clothes on? Do people just . . . wake up on hillsides like that? Where do our new bodies come from? How did you know to find me there? Are you some kind of social worker? And why me, why are you helping me, when millions of people must be—”

“Breathe.” Asher put his hands on Cooper’s shoulders, but the instructions were useless.

Cooper’s mind had initiated a kind of cascade of possible weirdnesses: accepting that he wasn’t dreaming or comatose and that he most definitely was strolling down a cobbled road where a prostitute had just been murdered as part of a routine transaction, was holding the arm of a madman, was hearing whispers inside his head—what possible flavors of the bizarre should he be preparing for? Dragons? Zombies? Dark Lords or Evil Empires? Mind control? Trickster gods or elaborately plotting aliens? The options fell away one by one, rendered inadequate by the chrome- colored clouds and the spirit of the bloodslut still shuddering inside her body. Cooper realized that despite his lifetime of escapist education, a tacit understanding of his own ignorance would be the only benefit for which he could possibly hope.

Asher seemed oblivious to Cooper’s internal cataclysm. “You’ll learn everything about it soon enough. No, we don’t all follow the same path of lives—we go where our spirits are drawn, so one life is rarely too different from the next. We are who we are, forever. Often we wake up younger, sometimes much younger, but also sometimes older. There’s a certain amount of chance to everything, Cooper.”

“What’s this ‘each life not too different from the next’ load?” Cooper pushed Asher away and threw his arms out wide. “I’d say this is pretty fucking different from what I’m used to!”

Asher paused. “With exceptions, obviously: the brave, ambitious, or”—here he gestured at Cooper—“the unlucky witless.” Then, changing the course of the conversation, “But there are other kinds of exceptions, like the body-bound, for instance, including the bloodsluts and most members of city government. They’re bound by contracts to this world, this city, and their own inescapable bodies.”

Cooper felt aghast and relieved at the same time— relief that the smalltown fictions of god and heaven from his childhood were as imaginary as the space ninjas and Japanese manga of his young adulthood, and aghast that not one single experience of his life before could possibly have prepared him for this day. Even his acid tongue was useless.

“And all this living, then, Sesstri said it wasn’t endless? That this city . . . that the City Unspoken is where people come to actually die, for real?”

“Yes.” Asher explained as kindly as he dared. “People live as long as they need to live, whether they want to or not. Toward the end, there is a . . . a kind of pilgrimage. There are different ways to end yourself, if that’s what you really want, but only True Death offers complete oblivion. And there are only a handful of places in the worlds where True Death is possible for those in need, although it can be a difficult blessing to obtain.” And then, “More so, lately.”

“Why?” Cooper felt his questions drying up in his throat. This was too much; he didn’t remember dying, and he couldn’t imagine . . . what he couldn’t imagine. The fears of others that murmured inside his head were drowned out by his own.

“True Death is only granted to the deserving few. You can’t just be suicidal, you have to have earned oblivion. And there are very few places where the gates to True Death are open. This city is one of those places. The oldest, if you believe the state propaganda, but certainly the most infamous. We are the crown jewel of ultimate obliteration.”

“Oh,” said Cooper, listening to his fears.

They walked in silence after that, and Cooper reassembled his self- possession by trying to orient himself geographically. He soon realized that tangled as the Guiselaine was, it had a certain logic to its construction. Each street seemed to be dedicated to one specific purpose—he and Asher darted down a lane lined with shops that sold only women’s shoes. Boots of every shape and condition were displayed below razortoed heels, beside fur-lined moccasins, rusted metal clogs, and slingback fantasies. The street after that held birds of all conceivable varieties perched on wire stands, bound by chains, or within cages. The air shimmered with clicks and caws and the cries of the falconers, swarthy brutes in leather greatcoats who held their most prized beasts on gloved wrists.

“How can you find your way through this termite’s nest?” Cooper broke the silence as they took another shortcut. They’d taken so many turns in such a short span that Cooper thought for certain they must have doubled back on their path at least half a dozen times, but he’d seen no repeated intersections or blocks he recognized.

“Sense of smell,” Asher answered, then reached into his pockets. “That reminds me. Take these.” He filled Cooper’s hand with octagonal coins of several sizes. “For later.” Cooper heard a finality in Asher’s voice that made him uneasy.

“Money. Thanks.”

“The big ones are dirty silvers, the smaller ones are nickeldimes. One dirty will get you a cheap meal. A nickeldime buys a rickshaw ride to just about anywhere. Don’t pay more than five dirties for a room or you’re being robbed blind.”

“Thank you, Asher,” Cooper said, bemused by the generosity. “But I think I’ll stick close to you for the time being.” He poured the coins into his empty pocket; when he’d lain down on his bed back home he’d had a stick of lip balm in his jeans, but discovered now that he’d lost it. Which was just great—Cooper was dead with the papery lips to prove it.

A man with liver-yellow skin and bloodshot eyes stumbled out of a storefront, screaming incoherently. Beneath his matted hair his face was wild, twisted, and he wore a strange kind of suit that looked far too new to be as filthy as it was. A woman in culottes and a faded t-shirt was shouting at the rabid-looking man. “Get out, you crazy pilgrim, your Dying insanity is bad for business!” She shooed him away. “Bells! What do you want with bridal veils, anyway?”

The stranger lurched first one direction and then another, taking a strange tack-and-jibe approach to walking. When he saw Asher, he winced, and his eyes slid sideways to Cooper with a kind of relieved hatred. He threw himself forward, hands reaching for Cooper’s throat.

Asher acted several beats more quickly. He pivoted on one foot and planted the other between Cooper and the madman, while reaching out with one long arm to wrap his hand around the man’s neck—tripping and choking the lunatic at the same time. It happened so fast that Cooper saw Asher as a blur of smoke, moving more swiftly than any normal man. His assailant came to a full stop with a sickening popping sound from inside his neck. With Asher supporting most of his weight from his gullet, the man made a choking sound and began to claw at the air— although the length of Asher’s arms kept him at a safe distance.

The deranged fellow glared at Cooper and raged, trying to shout through a half-crushed windpipe. “You have one!” he rasped. “Oh, oh, you should not be here. The darkness . . . you see the darkness, you hear the fright! The darkness in the depths can never be held to light. We Die, we live! Exult, extinguish!”

Asher threw the man—by the throat— across the street, into a row of trash cans. “Fuck off, pilgrim, or I will carve you into pieces.”

The man lay there amidst the trash, moaning. SisterWhereAreYou? Cooper heard the man clear as day.ICan’tHearYouAndItHurtsMe,Sister! His fear was an alarm bell. AstarnaxMySister ItHurtsToLiveWithoutYou IAmSoAlone.

“I lost my sister,” the man whimpered, aloud, to his trash-can pillows.

Cooper remembered Asher’s admonitions and held his tongue.

“I did not lose my sister!” he screamed, suddenly incensed again. “She was stolen from me! Or she . . . she Died. Did I? I didn’t Die, I couldn’t Die. Nothing happened but more heartbeats inside my haunted chest. Where did my sister go? Astarnax? Astarnax, where are you?” He was laughing now, looking around blindly like he was losing a game of hide- and-seek. “Why did you steal my sister? Why?” Cooper-OmphaleIBlameYouBlameYou!

Cooper was dumbstruck. How does he know my name? “I . . . I . . . I didn’t do anything to your sister,” he stammered.

“Liar!” the man screeched, a raptor’s cry. Window glass shuddered in its casements along the length of the street, a ripple of pain. The flow of the crowd juddered; everyone had felt that.

A moment of wretched silence passed before Asher pulled Cooper away, instantly lost in the crowd and hurrying from the crazy, too-knowing man. Cooper tried to gather himself, but his self did not want to obey. Too much, too fast, too wrong.

He grasped for a thought to ground him. A memory. Something green. He tried to remember his parents’ home in the summer, tried to picture the gardenias that grew so big and waxy, the heirloom irises from his mother’s childhood home, their purple flowers faded almost white. He tried to see the light through the windows as it fell on the desk in his father’s study. Yes. He had a green leather blotter with brass studs, and if you wrote on it you had to press very softly with the pen because he didn’t want to score the leather. Cooper knew these things still existed, but they were no longer his.

“What was wrong with that man?” he asked, walking in the lee of Asher’s arm down the street. How did he know my name? And what was that other thing he called me? Alm Fail? What does that mean?

“Ignore it.” Asher’s tone was clipped. “It’s nothing you need to worry about. The man was a con artist. He tailed us, or something. Whatever you do, don’t let crazy people on the street make you question your own sanity. In all likelihood that’s how they got that way.”

“Why does everyone seem to want to die?”

Asher merely shook his head. His eyes darted around as if looking for an escape. “Watch out for the crazies.” They passed two grimy men playing cards on a rubbish bin. Asher dipped his head in their direction and added, “And watch out for the swindlers. Don’t be a fool with your money.”

Cooper snorted. “I’m not an idiot—money is money. But what are they playing?”

“Three Whores. It’s a scam, can’t be won.”

“OK,” said Cooper as they turned down yet another side street. “Then why would anyone play?”

“Why does anyone ever gamble?” He gave Cooper a sideways look. “Don’t your people enjoy things that are bad for them?”

When Cooper didn’t answer, Asher gave him another, more searching look. Cooper couldn’t help but notice the perfect proportions of Asher’s gray face, or the squared lope of his shoulders.