The Waking Engine (43 page)
Lallowë swung her legs off the chaise and stood in one fluid motion, turning her back on her quarry. She didn’t spare him so much as a glance.
“Congratulations on your newfound parlor trick and assorted mutilations. Please excuse my brevity, I have less insignificant worms to crush.” She snapped her fingers and Tam appeared in the archway.
Cooper just sat there, of course. Would he gain from this? A finger in every evil pie—perhaps literally—and a body bound to the City Unspoken. Scoured and scolded and given just enough of a taste of power to realize the profundity of his own powerlessness. Spitting tacks. Would this work to his favor, or condemn him further?
He shook his head and marveled at the mortal capacity to adapt to horrible circumstances. How far I’ve come from horror, he thought. Now when I get maimed—as one does—I just wonder what it’ll do for me.
The marchioness had dismissed him from her world entirely. He no longer existed. She snapped again and her domo stepped forward, an obsequious expression on his fox’s face.
“Tam, draw me another bath. I’m going back to work.”
Boredom. How dare Terenz-de-Guises talk to him about boredom? Asher’s gray face felt white-hot with fury as he stalked through the tangled streets of the Guiselaine. The poncey voice of the marquis rang in his ears.
Asher had made choices and had abided by them, but this . . . nobody ever took the Undertow seriously, those liches were just a handful of bitter noble and scholastic remnants whose experiments had gone awry. They posed no threat, even for the undead—they stood as nothing in comparison to, say, the Abnegate Redoubt or the mobile necropoli of the Bloodless Sky. That they’d gained power over the last few years was regrettable, but was only exceptional when considering how they’d accomplished their ascendancy. What—who—they used to give themselves power.
Asher kept his anger stoked and level with that thought. Abiding by one’s choices never grew easier, even if you forgot your age. Age, he fumed. You were supposed to be my ally.
Three lanes met in a little triangular nook of an intersection, and in a darkened recess some forgotten artisan had installed a fountain. A limestone sea horse spat water into a scalloped bowl—here Asher stopped, looking down. What he had thought he’d felt atop the whale- skinned tower of the Undertow, it wasn’t possible. Was it?
If he’d only known. Did this mean Chara was alive somewhere, too? He’d thought them both Dead. If he’d known he wasn’t the last, that he had an heir . . . he would never have abused his legacy so. He would never have mutilated himself.
For all the liches in the worlds, all the jackbooted blackguards stoned on the fumes of undeath, Asher could only blame himself. He shook off a brief but intense urge to smash his head to pulp on the stone sea horse.
It’s begun. Will we all drown?
Placing his hands on either side of the fountain, Asher stared into the water and flexed a mental muscle he’d half-feared had atrophied. In the bowl of the sea horse fountain, a vision kindled and the astonished visage of Lallowë Thyu appeared. Her face was illuminated by gold- green light and her bare shoulders were wet—was she in the bath? With glowing lights?
“Why what an honor, my—”
Asher cut off the Marchioness before she could finish. “Shut your cow mouth you half-breed abortion.” Her mouth formed a perfect O. “It’s over, Thyu. This is a courtesy call: run.”
“Pardon me?” Lallowë recovered and nearly succeeded in sounding amused, but beneath her glibness he could see that he’d shaken her. Yes, yes, yes. She’s as guilty as she looks.
“I told you to run. Get out of my city while you can.” He crooked his fingers over the water and his fetch-window shifted, swiveling its point of view up and away from her lap to hover over her face instead, dominating her. He saw the object she cradled between her soapy breasts—it was one of the newer syncretistic fusions, the rage among the high-end tinker set as of a few years ago: a cabbage- sized oyster shell containing an electrical grid matrix suspended in an arcane medium. Asher didn’t have an obsession with everyday artifice— magical, technological, metaphysical, spiritual, or otherwise. He didn’t need to, and now that it was too late, he realized how naïve he’d been.
Thyu looked up at him from her bath. There was no more pretense from her—she’d stopped the coy game in which he was a man intruding on her, a woman, in the bath. They were both beyond that— he was more than a man and she had never been anything so decent as a woman.
“Run?” She smiled at him with serpent’s fangs folding down from the roof of her mouth. “Why would I do that? I hear music and feel something throbbing down below: I think things here might finally get interesting.”
The street shook beneath him, sloshing water out of the fountain, and Asher gripped the stone with both hands to keep his balance.
The snake laughed. “You know, instead of drafting morbid fantasies from your own failures, you should be thanking me for maintaining normalcy within at least a portion of this city. You might also thank me for my failure to retrieve Cooper from the Lady.”
Asher grimaced, and opened the well of his rage. “You think you’ve meted out agony to the father you’ve strung up in your water closet? I was practicing cruelty before your mother founded her dynasty, and I will snap your mind without taking a breath. I will rob you of your precious self-possession and leave you braying for mercy like a mule with a broken back, and that’s better than you deserve.”
If Asher expected some sign of fear or submission from the marchioness, he was disappointed. She only laughed harder, clapping her soapy hands.
“I’ll pass on your own regards to my new guest. He’s a friend of yours. Well, what’s left of a friend of yours. But then, you’ve had all that time to get used to losing friends and family, no?” Her question trailed off as she was distracted by something, a thin sound, like a lonely piper or flutist. “Cooper?” Asher despaired before the ground shook again, more violently this time, and the street whipped up like a billowed bedsheet and threw him to his feet. Astonishment replaced anger as Asher watched a bank building, its cornices hundreds, maybe thousands of years old, crumble into sand before his eyes. In the dead of night the building was empty, but the homes on either side and all along the cypress-lined Boulevard Hagia Khan Ruespiel were not— and Asher heard screams as children woke and parents dashed from their beds. The whole boulevard vibrated to something huge that shuddered underneath.
Underneath. Bells for the bloated dead, not now. The chains. Could it be the Winnowed? They were a reliable tribe, populated with the best souls the worlds had to offer—or the purest, for those who made the distinction—and dedicated themselves to preserving the buried history of the City Unspoken. The Winnowed were allies to anyone with the best interest of the city and its people at heart, surely they would not permit the masons to even inspect the instruments at the heart of the web of catenary chains, let alone attempt to operate the antediluvian mechanism? Asher stepped out of the alley and looked to the northwest, toward the nearest exposed length of chain, winched up into the belfry of a tower— the street-level anchors he remembered from so long ago that had been built when the masons’ ancient forebears squared off the chains, fixing them around underground drums and securing the links to buttressed towers above, like the pendulums of massive grandfather clocks. They’d hidden the chains’ true function within the maze of the undercity and used the rising level of the streets to their advantage, burying the truth far below, where only the Winnowed dwelt. He’d thought they could be trusted with Anvit’s gambit; had he been wrong?
Sure enough, the anchor tower was collapsing, and the chain—as thick as a carriage— seemed to be slicing through the street like a wire through cheese as it pulled toward its original position; the chain ripped through the cobblestones as it half fell, half slid along its path. Stone and dirt erupted in a line of destruction that sheared straight down the boulevard, peppering the faces of the buildings with shrapnel as it did so. Three hundred paces of the Boulevard Hagia Khan Ruespiel were obliterated before the chain dropped below street level, although another fifty paces collapsed as the ancient metal continued to tear through the supporting structures beneath.
Even after the immediate destruction ceased, Asher felt troublesome rumblings underfoot as the chain continued to pull. Even though he couldn’t see it, this scene must be repeating itself across the city, wherever the chains had been secured aboveground. A spiderweb of destruction with the Dome at its center, ripping through squares and piazzas and courtyards, as the bell towers were pulled down— bells, there were towers everywhere! He’d made certain of that himself, long ago when he thought things might work out for the better.
Towers everywhere. And one elevator.
Asher spun on his heel and sprinted toward another landmark, the conical volcano of friezes and temple porticos that suddenly occupied all of his attention: the Apostery.
I hardly knew then that I was building the foundations for a new world. I daresay that if I had, the only thing I would have changed would have been my own soiled panties.
Of course you mustn’t believe me. All these lives later and I still harbor the pretentions of a girl, isn’t that humbling? Well, it ought to be. I should tell the truth, at my end: I would have found a way to break the worlds one way or another. A hammer, a boy, a song—’twas all the same to me.
—Attributed to Lady Senator Emeritus Purity Rosa-Kloo, before her death
Purity folded her hands in her lap, trying to minimize the chafing of her restraints against her wrists. Formally, she’d been arrested by Leibowitz guardsmen, not praetors, and Lady Mauve’s henchmen had stashed her in an oversized closet, where she shared a settee with a terrified maid. Why they’d thought it necessary to keep Purity manacled, she didn’t know—true, she’d Killed a peer and destroyed the most valuable artifacts in the known history of the City Unspoken, but what further danger could she possibly pose? The use of house guardsmen rather than praetors indicated the degree of upheaval within the Circle— guardsmen were a poor replacement for the sterling warriors of the royal seat.
Praetors wouldn’t have bothered. They wouldn’t have stashed her in a closet either, like these cheese-headed Leibowitz guardsmen. The praetorian guard would have followed protocol and dropped Purity into an oubliette where she’d be confined to the dark, nourished by the effluvia of the teardrop- shaped gourd cells. She’d visited the dungeons a year or so ago, when she and her friends—her now Dead and/or former friends— still thought they could escape the boredom of Dome life by arranging little excursions.
Bitzy had marveled at the oubliettes in particular— she had a fondness for horticulture, and the single-occupant cells were grown, not built, from hybridized thrashmelons. Purity had watched Bitzy marvel that such a sweet treat could be coaxed into a tool of containment and misery. Purity herself hadn’t marveled at all—she’d looked around her, above, at the swirling mosaic ceilings of the dungeons, the gilded torch sconces, the wealth with which even the palace prisons had been fabricated— and she hadn’t been surprised one whit. Even the architecture of the City Unspoken sang out its arrogance and presumed superiority; over men, over the fantastic confections of the fey—whose design principles Purity suspected had once inspired the creation of the oubliettes—and over the erstwhile gods themselves.
Bells, Purity pouted, I hope tragedy has made Bitzy more insightful. Or at least more interesting.
Her thoughts were interrupted by the click of bootheels on marble, followed by the appearance of the steel head of Mauve Leibowitz. Lady Leibowitz’s face lacked any expression, and Purity wondered just how much the Circle Lady knew about tonight’s events. She must know that her daughter was Dead, but did she also know NoNo had been the Murderer? Or was Purity being held for epic vandalism only? She hadn’t behaved very well when they arrested her, she was ashamed to admit. Lots of tears and blubbering apologies she didn’t quite remember. Mauve Leibowitz would have smiled when they told her that.
Lady Mauve looked through Purity as if she didn’t exist, instead addressing the mousey chambermaid who shared Purity’s makeshift cell. The girl had sat there and refused to look away from her hands, like a pious dormouse. Now her head shot up, a dim light of hope kindling in her red face.
“Cleaning girl. You’ve been cleared, so don’t fret.” Mauve’s voice was a wire brush scraping across raw skin, and the little house maid redoubled her tremulous fretting.
If Lady Mauve felt any concern about her own future in light of her daughter’s alleged crimes, it did not show. Indeed, the woman’s self- importance only seemed to have ballooned in the wake of NoNo’s Death. She must know she was done for, Purity surmised, but appeared determined to wield her influence until the very last moment. That should surprise no one and spelled further trouble for Purity, though she did not blame the woman. It might take weeks for the Circle to declare her formal impeachment.
“Essa, child.” Mauve relented and admitted that she knew the girl’s name. “Stop shaking. You were only detained in case you saw something, not because you could have done anything.” Lady Mauve never so much as glanced at Purity—perhaps she was trying to forget what Purity had done— and then withdrew. No doubt to stomp off to some ner vous caucus where she would try to bully the Circle into saving her own hide, probably by insisting that Purity’s be tanned and stitched into a riding coat. Sudden concern for her father forced Purity to look down at her own hands in shame.
How could she have been so reckless? It was one thing to endanger herself, but to put her father in jeopardy . . . and her entire family! What would Pomeroy say, and what if she had ruined his chances for an advantageous marriage? Her mother and sister were easier to predict: they’d be furious. Parquetta would likely never speak to Purity again.
She heard the guardsmen gossiping about her fate over a wineskin they oughtn’t to have been enjoying while on duty.
“That Baron will be pulled down for sure over this,” the older guard said.
The younger one winced. “That’s a well bad fate, innit? Assets liquidoodled, all his properties auctioned off to the rest of the quality.”
The old guard grumbled something and the younger one added, “Yeah, putrefied, that’s what I meant. The Baron’s life? No, no, the family will survive, if you can call that survival.” He paused before asking his elder fellow, “Do you reckon they’ll Kill the girl for it?”
Purity could practically hear the bored nod of the Leibowitz family. Little Essa squeaked “Eep!” and covered her mouth with her hand, looking at Purity with a nauseating amount of pity.
“Don’t worry about me, Essa,” Purity said with an equanimity she did not half feel, addressing the house keeper for the first time. “I’ll be fine. They can’t Kill me. They can’t Kill anyone ever again.”
Suddenly Purity felt a burning earnestness in her chest and she grabbed Essa’s hand. “You tell them that, Essa, when they let you out of here. Oh, don’t make that face, girl, you’ll be fine. You were just waxing the floors, bells, they can’t hold that against you.” Essa nodded, still terrorized.
Purity squeezed the small hand, red from scrubbing floors. “No, Essa, you’ll be out of this cell by nightfall, and when you go, I want you to tell everyone—your sisters, your mama, the men and women who work with you—you tell them that you were in a cell with Purity Kloo, the demon who shattered the Circle Unsung and broke the backs of the nobles. You tell them that it was the Circle who’s been behind all the Killing, but that they can’t ever Kill again. You tell them that the secret that made the Circle powerful is over, broken, done— and that there’s no reason to bend your knee to any noble ever again unless you’re doing so of your own free will and for fair coin.”
Essa’s cheeks reddened further. She did not have the look of a civil revolutionary. “Begging your pardon, Lady Miss Kloo, but, but . . .” the cleaning girl stammered. “All you did was break a few windows and Kill one of your girlfriends?”
Purity put her head in her hands. Getting the truth out was always an uphill battle, wasn’t it? Did making things right ever get easier?
“Essa, you’re right. Absolutely right. All I did was Kill a friend and smash some windows. And if you stop fussing and sniffling, I’ll tell you why that changes everything.”
“Well . . . alright, ma’am. If you say so.”
Essa literally sat on her hands as Purity began recounting her recent escapades, beginning with the butchering of Rawella Eightsguard. The girl’s eyes grew wider as she listened, and by the time Purity reached her showdown with NoNo and the destruction of the Dawn Stains, she thought Essa’s eyelids might simply atrophy and disappear entirely.
“Them Circle lords could go around Killing anyone they wanted to the whole time?” Essa asked, doubly amazed when Purity explained how many hundreds of de cades the Circle Unsung had maintained their True Death détente.
“And your friend was Killing us just for practice.” That came out softer, Essa’s voice tinged with what Purity prayed was the first blush of outrage—or at least awareness of the world around her. The girl would spread the truth, Purity felt sure of it.
“And now you’ve smashed them windows, they can’t Kill no more.”
“The song lived in the glass. Our throats could borrow it, but now that the Stains are gone, it’s just music. So yes, the power that anchored the Circle is gone, Essa.”
Purity was technically lying to the girl, since she had no notion about what would happen now and who knew how the Weapon functioned, let alone the nature of its connection to the stains— but Purity believed what she said; now that she’d had time to think about the Dawn Stains and the Weapon—the song— she’d reached several conclusions. Purity felt confident that history would prove her correct: the Dawn Stains heralded from the age of the aesr, who were a species of First People. What fragments of history from that era that had survived strongly associated the aesr with light and music—was it such a stretch, then, to hypothesize that they had preserved their gift in the Dawn Stains for their successors? Like an insect in amber, the aesr’s talent had persevered through aeons, known only to the Circle Unsung and the prince.
Essa shook her head. She might not have benefitted from the same education and life of enrichment as Purity, but the girl possessed her own body of knowledge. “Begging your pardon, Lady Miss, but how will that change anything, if the nobles still own everything? It isn’t escaping Murder we work all our lives for, is it now? It’s nickeldimes to feed the family, and clothe ’em. And if that’s any different today than it was yesterday, ma’am, I don’t see how.”
Purity puffed herself up for a lecture about the primacy of power structure, and how a destabilization at the top of a food chain, even if it seemed unrelated, would mean incrementally larger disruptions for the status quo of each descending tier. “The hierarchy that was secured by the threat of mutually assured destruction will begin to decay, you see, and—”
Then a piece of the wall pushed itself onto the floor with a crash that startled both women. Essa would have screamed, but Purity pinched the skin of her thigh hard, and the cleaning girl bit her lip and managed only a frantic whimper. On the other side of the cell a hexagonal hole appeared where the block had been dislodged, and as the girls stared, the dustsmeared face of Kaien Rosa emerged.
“Come on,” he said, and cocked his head only to knock it against the block above. “Ouch. I can’t get my shoulders through, but you should be able to slip out. Hurry up before someone comes to find out why the walls are falling apart.”
Almondine met her sister without emotion. Lallowë did not return the favor.
What she did was screech in fury. A glass- shattering, earsplitting screech that lasted over a minute. Downstairs, Tam clapped his hands over his ears and Cooper would have done the same, except he was too busy hiding under the kitchen table. Lallowë sat in her bath, her nearly complete matrix gleaming inside the shell, immersed in the only two comforts she had in this filthy city— and in one sweep of the door, all of her security had been shattered. All of her plans. Hopes.
She screeched in fury and disbelief and hate and loneliness and defiance and in a wretchedly sincere relief to have her sister returned to her. She screeched at her mother, who surely orchestrated this last-minute betrayal, at Almondine for daring to go away and daring to return, and—mostly— at herself for not anticipating this twist, and for the weakness inside herself that made her glad to see her sister. Later, when she could, Lallowë would excoriate her father for passing on to her that human weakness; now, she would continue to point a turquoise claw at Almondine and scream.
Almondine simply stood there, expressionless. She wore a hound’s-tooth pea coat, grey and black, and a pale blue dress that belonged on a young girl. No longer made of wood, her face pink and perfect, Almondine stared at her sister as if trying to remember Lallowë’s name. Her hair curled at the nape of her neck in a bob—the same hue and luster as when she was made of cherrywood, but her eyes were empty. Perhaps they’d always been that way.
Lallowë reached to the side of the wide shale pool and snatched up her reengineered, reprogrammed vivisistor. It looked inconspicuous inside its pocket watch shell, but it represented the accumulation of years of positioning, conniving, hours of wasted talking, and marriage. She shook the living bauble at her sister and forced herself to find words.
“ Why? Why did I do all of this work for you to just wake up like nothing happened? Do you have any idea what I’ve put myself through?” She stood, naked, water and bubbles pouring off her naked breasts.
“Sister, I’m glad to see you again too.” Almondine ran her finger along the polished edge of the door frame. “What. A happy. Reunion.”
“Mother brought you back, she must have done. What did I do to earn this?” Lallowë wrapped herself in a terry cloth robe and shook her hair to dry it in an instant.
“You can ask her when she arrives.” Almondine primped her own bob with one hand. “Although if I were a betting elf, I’d put my money on simple ill will.”
“Mother is coming here?” Lallowë screeched again. Then, calmly, “Of course she is.”
“I understand you’ve been researching the vivisistors that enable Mother’s transformation. What is she about?” Almondine’s blue eyes didn’t seem to blink at all.
“How do you know that? You’ve been wood.” She started to walk past Almondine, but took the other door instead, that led to her dressing rooms.
“Even wood dreams. You should have some idea of what she’s after.”
“Yes, well maybe I should, Almsy. And you’ve been dead for years, you should have stayed that way.” Lallowë turned to her vanity so that Almondine could not see, and reached out for a box of smooth red metal—but she stopped short of touching it. Not yet. Instead she dropped her robe and drew a chocolate wool bolero across her shoulders, fingering the brocade for comfort.