The Waking Engine (46 page)

How had her mother wandered so far from these ideals? Over the years, Lallowë had watched the faerie queen butcher herself: replacing her heart with a boiler, then a fuel cell, and finally a box of carbon with a piece of a star inside. She’d torn her jaw from her face and given herself a pair of silver lips instead, encrusted her hands with steel knuckles and pneumatic wrists. The pale dancer’s legs Lallowë remembered as a girl had gone too, hacked off to be replaced by a modular chassis that could be endlessly upgraded and extended. Then followed the dark coils of a polyvinyl wyrm, articulated manipulator arms, and still less recognizable amendments. The black monstrosity that replaced her mother’s hair was all curved horns and ablative plating, armor against a threat the Cicatrix had never been able, or willing, to articulate—knotted cabling that fell past her shoulders only to reenter her chassis at intervals between segmented scales.

Lallowë tried to clear her thoughts, but the ghost of her mother hovered out of sight, taunting her. She tried to refocus her attention on the new heartbeat pulsing inside the flesh of her upper arm, but found herself distracted by the reflection of a row of jewelry necks on the worktable behind her. A string of heirloom emeralds seemed particularly offensive, so she commanded Tam to move the lights. But that only caused a string of lilac sapphires to annoy her, so Tam thought to throw a bedsheet over the whole wall and tie the corners around unlit sconces.

Lilac and emerald, emerald and lilac. Since she’d inserted the vivisistor, the colors seemed to sparkle in her head, in time with the pain. But nothing else.

It was a shame to obscure such beauty, especially the gems that came from the earth itself—the natural world of her childhood that she felt so determined to restore—but she needed to concentrate, and her head and womb throbbed. Somewhere between the worlds, the Cicatrix slithered toward the City Unspoken; the pain grew to a pitch, and Lallowë’s vision began to blur.

This is transit, she thought as her mother’s magics plucked her from her home—and, no doubt, Almondine as well. Where are you taking us, Mother? And what will you force upon us when we get there? Nixon, Sesstri, and Cooper jumped off the Barge Brightly and clambered up the levee to the edge of the Dome plaza. Sesstri dragged Cooper toward the monstrous thing at a clip, but Nixon stood his ground, assessing the scene.

Above the Dome swirled a spiral of black clouds. Away from their everburning towers, the amassed lich-lords of the Undertow seemed a smaller force; Nixon had little trouble imagining the light from the Dome extinguishing that curl of dark smoke. Beneath the circling lich-lords, he saw an army of black-clothed youth clashing with a regiment of Terenz-de- Guises house guards followed by what looked like a pack of revelers.

The Dome itself looked wrong. It still dominated the city like a half- buried moon of garden light, casting the now-barren piazzas that surrounded it in a leafy golden glow— but it looked odd—bigger? No, Nixon could see trees and buildings through slits in the thing. Why?

Because it’s opening up like a goddamned flower. Father, Son, and the Holy ass-raping poltergeist, it’s open. The place fucking opens.

The Dome eclipsed the sky, but the scene playing out on the grounds surrounding the capitol struck a more immediate note: the Undertow threw themselves with gleeful abandon against the red-and-black guardsmen and their contingent of citizens, the Undertow drummers beating out a walking bass, and some crazed few played horns that blew a calypso melody.

Neither host had reached the eastern approach yet, and Nixon saw Cooper and Sesstri run that way, skirting the battle. Good.

Nixon shook his head, not certain whether to save his skin or join the fray. His little heartbeat had become a war drum of its own, and for the first time in his lives Nixon found himself drawn to the abandon of violent self-destruction. He shook his head to clear it; why did he feel that way?

That thought was interrupted by a rallying cry from the forces battling the Undertow. There in the midst of the mêlée, Nixon recognized no less a personage than Oxnard Terenz-de-Guises, dripping sweat and smiling fiercely as he battled the liches’ fools.

Nixon crept closer. Terenz-de-Guises held one arm behind his back as he fended off two attackers at once. The marquis held an oiled leather blackjack with red-enameled studs, and wore what looked to Nixon like some kind of official uniform, a red jacket plated with medals and gold trim at the epaulets and wrists, and black boots that came almost to his thighs. With a chivalric effortlessness, he dodged and parried the blows of the Death Boy and Charnel Girl who beset him, though even Nixon was unimpressed with the scrappy fighting style of the Undertow forces. The children looked pressed, to him. They kept darting their eyes to the sky, where the lich-lords circled in a vortex.

Oxnard fended off a flurry of blows from a sandy-haired Death Boy while keeping his assailant between himself and the snarling Charnel Girl. While he spun and feinted, the marquis kept up a string of prattle that distracted his opponents.

“Young sir, please! I only want to dash inside—dash, mind you—and find a trinket that once belonged to my grandfather. I’ll only—girl, less slashy- slashy, if you don’t mind—” The Charnel Girl, a gangly thing with wide- set hips, lunged past her compatriot only to have the dirk knocked from her hand. She winced, shaking the sting from her fingers.

Oxnard continued, dancing away from a third attacker, a Charnel Girl who dove for his feet, “—I’ll only take a moment for myself, and then you lot can have at the place. I’ll even tell you where the praetors hide the good beer if only—you, other girl, stop stabbing my at my boots—if only you’ll forget to see me as I sneak inside, permiso?

The girl on the ground rolled away into the mêlée, and Oxnard kneed the Death Boy in the face as he bent down to retrieve his comrade’s fallen dirk.

“We could have had a nice chat, couldn’t we?” Oxnard lamented, spinning to kick the gangly Charnel Girl in the gut. She fell back. “But you lot refuse to be pleasant. I am an admiral, you know. I shan’t be kind.”

Darting into the fray, Nixon waved at the lord, then covered his head with his hands as he ducked behind the Charnel Girl’s knees. Oxnard took the proffered opportunity and feinted a lunge; the girl tried to step back but tripped over Nixon and fell, hard, onto the cobbled stones. Nixon looked up just in time to see the marquis’ steel-toed boot crack the fallen attacker’s skull. And again. Blood burst across the white of her eye.

“Much obliged and many thanks, small gentleman.” Oxnard swept the sweat from his brow with a ringed hand and nodded to Nixon.

“No problem,” Nixon grunted from the ground.

“I had a bit of a mood, but then I got the strangest feeling that my mother-in-law might be stopping by for a visit.” Oxnard squinted at the Dome. “So I threw together an army, just in case my hunch was correct. Do try not to die.” He strode away from the fighting, toward the capitol dominating the sky.

Nixon crawled across the cobblestones, met the gaze of the dying girl, and tried to smile. Her fingers twitched upon the hilt of her knife, unwilling to release her weapon even as her blood ran between the stones like miniature red canalworks. Gold light flooded out from the Dome, casting them all in sunset colors.

“Nice knife,” he said, running his finger along the blade. She made a drowning sound and blood bubbled from her nose and mouth.

Fuck.

“Look, doll.” Nixon put one hand on the girl’s shoulder. She doesn’t look a day over fifteen, Nixon thought. But god knows what that means, right?

“Hey, don’t tell anybody I said this, but, ya know . . . you’re gonna be okay, okay?” He pointed at the black clouds that whirled above the Dome. “Don’t be such a sucker next time, though. Those pricks used you, and now they’re fucked and you’re dead. Sorry.”

Then he lifted the looted knife and ran into the golden light, his pointy nose smelling glory below.

“Kaien, no. You can save lives here, or die out there.” Purity stabbed her finger into the mason’s barrel chest, not even remotely appreciating how firm and solid it was with each and every poke. “I know I always sound like I’m right but please, this time I really am.”

They stood at the gate to the Maidens’ Keep, which shuddered as the Dome glass that formed one whole wall fell away slowly. Kaien argued, but not with much conviction. He knew he’d be needed in a dozen places at once to save all the lives at jeopardy from structural collapses.

“You stay here, Purity. Let me keep you safe.”

She smiled. “You and I both know that’s absolutely not going to happen, and that you have to say it anyway.”

He kissed her. “I’ve never felt stupid for protecting a girl before.”

“I can’t die. I tried a lot. Worry about the people who can.”

The First Mason’s son was far too practical to argue with that. Purity ran from the Keep, surprised to find herself legitimately concerned for her peers. The Dome glass in Bitzy’s salon would be pulling away from the rest of the room, from the building, and even Kaien couldn’t say for certain that the Keep, or any of the other buildings that shared a wall with the Dome, would not collapse. What could he do? But a structural collapse would incur far more casualties than a silly old battle.

Just moments ago, she’d been arguing with Kaien about the unacceptable level of dust in the secret passage beneath the Dome, with Kaien insisting that the house keeping staff shouldn’t be faulted by virtue of the passageways being secret, when obviously that meant only that there was a secret house keeper, who should be sought out and reprimanded.

Now she’d left him behind to scurry on ahead, and grime was the last of her problems. She could see the battle as she ran along the garden path: Death Boys and Charnel Girls fighting ordinary citizens and, to her surprise, the house forces of Terenz-de-Guises. Already the praetors were assembling, trampling the grass with their perfectly square formations, platinum helms gleaming beneath direct sunlight for the first time in five years. The ground continued to shake violently beneath them all.

And then. Dead gods, the Groveheart. The Dome above had split into five identical slices, save for one which remained attached to the spike, the massive central column that had supported the Dome for aeons. As the leaves of the Dome opened, the spike lifted up and out of the ground, pulled at an angle by the tip of its slice of Dome.

But the damage to the primordial forest was beyond anything Purity had imagined. In the center of the forest, trees as tall as towers had been pushed up and toppled over— great banks of earth pushed up and fallen away, like a giant’s fist had punched through the forest.

And so it had. As she picked her way through the underbrush, Purity felt stronger vibrations abuse the ground, and something that looked like a golden ball pushed itself up from underground, rising in a straight line as the spike that had pierced it, now nearly horizontal, succumbed to its own weight and snapped off its portion of the opening Dome, crashing through the already-tortured forest below.

But the gold sphere kept rising, as big a mansion. Purity hurried closer, and saw that it rose atop three tiers of telescoping platforms made from the same yellow metal. Higher and higher it rose, and Purity saw stairs spiraling up the platforms. She had to take the long way around, and found herself skirting the muddy length of the fallen spike, the portion of it that had been underground. Its tip, she noted, was not gold but corroded iron, slick with some kind of black grease. She shuddered, and found the first step.

Like a wedding cake, the three-tiered platform rose above her, and overhead there circled a dark vortex she knew all too well from her many hours of staring longingly at the city that Fflaen had denied her. The liches were here, of course—their slaves waging the battle outside so the lords could invade from above.

Climbing the roots of a fallen sequoia to reach the foot of the stairs, Purity saw something wet and leathery, person- sized, that glowed like a faint moon and shook on the naked dirt.

“Help me,” croaked the wet leather, shuddering.

Purity pushed her way past fallen slabs of earth-clay and approached the thing. It was lit from within, and she saw the bones of a person curled up inside.

“Help,” it said again, and Purity recognized the voice as female. Desperately willing her intuition to be true, Purity tore off something she would have called a yolk sack if it hadn’t been as large as a person and covering a creature made of light, but who spoke with the voice of a woman. Her flesh streamed light, once Purity scooped away the amniotic muck, and as soon as she’d worked an arm free, the woman helped to free herself.

Purity verged upon a question, but she knew with a thunderbolt that it could be only one person in all the worlds, thought Dead before birth, like her sister Parquetta’s miscarried child. The woman confirmed Purity’s hunch when she turned her head toward Purity—who saw the cyclopean face and the bone-crested skull, blinked, and then nearly fainted from the force of the recognition.

As soon as she regained control of herself, Purity dropped to her knees with the speed of a thunderclap. “Oh my, oh oh my, you’re alive. You’re alive!” Purity covered her face with her hands.

“Who is?” the aesr asked, wounded and disoriented.

“You are!” Purity was shaking, and she hovered her hands over the glowing body. “Fflaen’s daughter, the last living aesr and the only woman in the worlds who could restore our city. Fuck me upside down, this is a day!”

She held out her arms with reverence, lifting the creature’s enormous head by the chin and wiping off the last of the restorative mucus. Her eyes were wide.

“Oh Prama,” she said. “We thought you Dead for so long.”

Purity helped the weak thing to her feet, uncertain what to do. But Prama nodded her crested head at the golden sphere high above.

“Please,” she begged, “take me there.”

That had been Purity’s intent, but now it was a royal decree. Supporting the aesr, Purity and Prama took the first of a thousand steps.