The Waking Engine (17 page)

Red wisps pulled into Alouette’s body like smoke billowing backward into the fire. Yes, Sesstri imagined that Chesmarul—her self—would be reduced to the limits of the tissue within her rapidly solidifying skull. To be as the Third People are: alive and small and desperate. When the color bled away from Alouette’s warm brown eyes, Sesstri saw a human confusion there, a genuine waking, as real as Sesstri’s own waking here, in this too-quiet district.

“Hello, Pinky.” Alouette blinked her eyes, glanced around, and frowned. “This city is too sane by half.”

Sesstri planted herself in front of the First Person. “I demand to know what you’ve embroiled us in, Chesmarul.”

“No.” Alouette shook her head and pointed to her chest. “Alouette.” She glanced toward Nixon, unconscious on the grass. “Did he give Cooper the ribbon?”

“Excuse me?” Sesstri folded her arms across her chest.

“He didn’t, did he? Little shit. We’ll sort that out. You lost the man, then?” Alouette looked Sesstri up and down. “My, this is a mess. And you can’t even get my name straight.”

Sesstri pushed aside the questions, demands, complaints, and murderous assaults that crowded her head. Yes, she found herself in a ridiculous tourist trap of a neighborhood, facing an absurd being from before the dawn of time, while Death itself ground to a halt that would soon fill the metaverse with a disease of endless living. Yes, there was a gray man somewhere out in the City Unspoken who filled her head with feelings Sesstri had thought she’d amputated. Yes, she had plenty of plenty and not enough time or knowledge to reckon with it all. But she was Optimae Sesstri Manfrix, daughter of the Horse lord, and she had conquered death and men in equal measure. She would get a single straightforward answer from Alouette, and she would make it count.

“Why is Cooper here?”

“Oh, I have no idea.” Alouette shook her head with emphasis. “None at all. Let’s hope that answering that question is one of the things a Cooper does.”

Sesstri clenched her fists into balls of stone. “What is Cooper?”

“Today? Eh . . .” Alouette’s eyes darted evasively. “Don’t we decide that for ourselves, Pinky, each and every morning?”

“You have been meddling in every aspect of mine and Cooper’s lives— you can feign all the ignorance you want, Alouette, but you cannot convince me that it’s genuine.”

“Fine.” Alouette looked ready to make nice. “So, Cooper. I made him the center of everything, and I’m not sure why.”

Sesstri nearly choked on her surprise. That was a straightforward answer, if there was any truth to it. “Are you—”

“—No, look, I am sure why.” Alouette stood her ground, combed her curls with her fingers and then cocked her head. “I’m the sort of person who can only exist when she’s grounded. That’s not a metaphor. I’m in flesh right now because I . . . I honestly can’t be bothered to focus on something as small and quick as a human life, if I’m not bound by human context.” Alouette bit her lip.

“So you’re telling me that the ancient being who is revered as the patron of the lost is . . .”

“. . . Completely inured to human suffering, yes.” Alouette’s expression held sympathy and pity in equal measure. “You expected something else, from a woman older than suns?”

“You’re not a woman, and you know it.”

“But I am. I am, and I am, and I am.” Alouette almost stomped her feet in earnest. “I’m in this wrinkly, fatty brain and these tidy, internal gonads, and I’m telling you, girl, I’m a woman.”

Sesstri huffed. “Why make such a show?”

Alouette looked genuinely confused. “What are you talking about?” she asked.

“Do you remember manifesting in the district in an explosion of red hair?” Sesstri waved behind her, toward the branches of the Jamaica, where patrons continued to drink in peace.

“That? Oh.” Alouette rolled her eyes. “For me, honey, that was just a red dress.”

Sesstri marched off, then stopped herself, turned around, and threw her hands up. “Why here, of all places?”

Alouette followed Sesstri. “Bonseki- sai and I go way back. If I appear, it’s always here. You should ask the angel about it, he’ll tell you more than I remember right now.” She picked at her skin. “These bodies. How do you live so small?”

“Angel? What angel?” Sesstri wasn’t so much annoyed at more obscure drivel as she was excited at the prospect of anyone else to question— anyone but Alouette. “There are no angels in a godless city, unless you’re speaking in riddles.”

“No riddles, only words, which amount to the same thing.” Alouette shook her head. “The angel—the Angel of Bonseki-sai? That’s half the reason I’m even here; where is he?” Alouette peered around her as if there might be an angel hiding under the fat leaves of a jade plant. “The Angel of Bonseki-sai is a famous monument, it’s what brought the district back to life after—oh.” Alouette paused. “Time. Fuck. I’m in time now. Oh, why didn’t I bring a map!”

Sesstri massaged the divot between her brows and waited for Alouette to stop rambling. She knew there was meaning there, and she memorized every word for later analysis, but in the moment she could do little but keep herself from screaming at the woman.

“Huh.” Alouette winked at Sesstri. Winked. “I told you, the city is too sane. There’s not even an angel yet. No wonder this place is so quiet—the angel comes to answer the madness. The svarning should be here by now.”

Sesstri started speaking before her resentment could kick in and impede any opportunity to learn from Alouette. Any window of lucidity was priceless. “We found some symptoms of the svarning as the number of Dying began to increase noticeably.” Sesstri led with what little data she had. “But as the inability to achieve True Death has become more widespread, we haven’t seen a corresponding increase in the svarning— notthat we know what to look for. The svarning . . . it should come, but it doesn’t.”

Alouette shook her head, not understanding. “That’s not how it works. There aren’t words or small-enough ideas to fit into these heads and mouths we have, but if the Dying cannot Die, then the svarning will come. It must come.”

She paused, then her eyes lit up and her curls shook. “Machines! Oh, oh, there is an old song that I do not quite remember. The Angel sings it all the time, or he did. There are machines . . . engines of being. They are hearts, and they are clubs. Oh, oh. This head hurts me.” Alouette pressed her fingertips against her temples and scowled. “The svarning comes. Something manipulates it, but it comes, Sesstri.”

Sesstri nodded. She understood what Alouette meant—one side of a seesaw couldn’t go up without the other going down. Imbalance was imbalance. “What could possibly manipulate the svarning?”

And can we use it to save ourselves?

Alouette wasn’t paying attention. She knelt to place her palms on the resinous floor of Bonseki-sai, mercifully black again. She frowned, and lowered her cheek to the ground as well. Then she shot up, a look of alarm on her face. “Listen, I need to go. I’ll see you in a bit, okay?”

“Tell me one more thing,” Sesstri asked, wondering what Alouette could possibly infer from kissing the ground. “Why don’t these people notice you?”

“What people?” Alouette scrunched up her face.

“The ones all around us!” Sesstri waved her arms and pointed behind her, where the Jamaica still bustled. It did bustle, didn’t it?

Alouette fixed Sesstri with a funny look. “Girl, nobody lives here, it’s Bonseki-sai.The place is fucking haunted.”

“Of course it’s not. There are plenty of people here.” Sesstri turned around. The door to the Jamaica was half-hidden beneath overgrowth, its cleverly designed windows boarded. Its garden was empty of people. “But, but I woke up here.”

“Yeah,” Alouette said slowly. “That’s why I took care of you, hon— this is no place for a girl to wake up. You were lost. You still are, if you think there’s anyone but the two of us standing here.”

Flowers. The scents of flowers, cacophonous and overlapping: jasmine and lavender and rose, orange blossom and honeysuckle and peony. Flowers circled his sleep-self, the non-dreaming seed of thought that kept company with the darkness while Cooper slept. As his mind crept open, the scents expanded to include sandalwood, then amber and musk, anise seed, mace and pepper. Something else, too, laced between the clash of perfumes—alive, seeking, spiked and dangerous. It was poison.

Cooper’s mind woke by degrees, the seed of his sleeping mind unfurling its cotyledon leaves—not yet himself but beginning to apprehend himself again, the down pillows beneath his cheek, the linen against his naked skin. A sound like banners rippling in the wind became soft music, sighing strings, and a voice just shy of singing, nuzzling his ears in the gentlest ways—an anti-lullaby, a reveille blown from a subtle throat and matched with fingers on his temples, chrism on his lips and brow and throat. He underwent a ritual of awakening that men had sacrificed armies to enjoy, given freely to Cooper by the Lady of La Jocondette as he lay in her canopied bed, in her lap, in her inestimable care. Somehow, the seedling of his waking mind knew this.

“Wake, wake, wake little asp,” she all but whispered her song, every nuance of the moment a variable manipulated by her cunning. Even the heat of her breath was praise. “Wake, wake, wake and warm yourself on my breast, sun yourself in my blood, O serpent, O man. The suns are shining and all the worlds await you, little snake; come and greet the morning coiled in the cup of my palm.”

Cooper felt the mattress stir beneath him, and the fingers left off massaging his head. The notes of song and scent drifted away, and he lifted his head to follow his captor.

She moved with more nobility than the Dome itself could contain. The woman who woke him was not beautiful, strictly speaking—in the predawn half light she stood veiled by dark hair, rivers of black curls framing the dark pools that were her eyes. A chin that would have been weak on another woman, and the hooked nose of a general, not a prince. Her figure was wider than some strictures of beauty permitted, with heavy breasts and hips like the sacred cow, Hathor, who was her onetime guardian.

No longer.

Cooper marveled at the pieces putting themselves together in his head, as if the thoughts were thinking themselves. Weirder and deeper, deeper and weirder . . .

The Lady matched Cooper’s gaze and smiled, and if she knew exactly the path his thoughts were taking, well, it was a oft-trod path, and she had led many men and women down its length during her centuries. Even in the City Unspoken, she had founded legends and ended dynasties.

“Welcome to the waking,” she purred, “long-lost child of Rome.”

If the Lady was flower- and-song then Cooper’s thoughts were thorn-and-noise— he pulled his mind back into his body against every instinct, which was to hide in the darkness and remain unborn to the world. A stillborn bastard for some other mother to mourn.

“You are wondering where you are, who I am, and why you’re here. You wonder if you dream still, or if the madness has overtaken you at last, and the moon and her lunatic children have claimed you for their own.”

“I . . .” Cooper bit back the urge to answer, and watched the Lady draw thin curtains from the windows. The room matched the light outside— pale blue walls decorated with porcelain, woven mats on the floor.

She turned up the wick on the lanterns, and continued, “You are a guest here at La Jocondette, and though my patrons overpraise me with an honorific I no longer merit, it would give me great pleasure to hear you address me by the name given to me at birth by my father, and that is Thea. I am Thea Philopater, and you are CooperOmphale, whether you know it or not.”

“Hello.” His voice was thick with sleep and hoarse from the shouting— the shouting that he remembered with a rush of adrenaline.

He sat up too quickly. “We were attacked—”

“—So I understand. A useless act of violence, in my sight, but such are the means of men in any world. You are safe here, Cooper. Know that.”

“Safe!” He barked a laugh. “I hear unspoken fears and the Dying roam the streets like lunatics. You violently kidnapped me and attacked my friends. What’s safe?”

“How like Asher you sound, child of Rome.” She fluffed his pillow and he lay his head back down. “Has he affected you so profoundly, or is it merely that common contrivance of man in the face of the overwhelming: feigned bravado?”

“I’m not brave or feigning—just overwhelmed. About ten times over. How do you know Asher?” From her considerable décolletage, an answer sprang to mind.

The Lady closed her eyes. “I cannot imagine how you could fail to be overwhelmed, under the circumstances. Do you still pray? Have you prayed today, CooperOmphale?”

“Excuse me?”

She opened her eyes, and they were iron. “Has a single day on the other side of life shattered your faith, or do you yet venerate whatever gods our people worship in the centuries since my feet last touched Earthen sands?”

“Earthen sands?” Cooper asked, but as he said the words he realized that he already knew.

“You and I walked the same world, darling boy.” She raised his chin with a finger so that their eyes met. “It has been many years since I ruled there, but I have read some few of the scrolls they scribed about my first life, and seen the play-acts. I am not so luminous as that purple-eyed angel, but surely you know me?”

Cooper heard more than a little vanity in her tone. Purple-eyed angel? Queen? If he hadn’t known better, he’d have thought he was still dreaming. Either this woman was batshit barmy or she was . . . the realization crystalized. He was suddenly giddy with the idea. This was possible only here, so how could he be wrong to doubt it? Could the City Unspoken be a blessing in disguise? Possibilities bloomed.

Again, she seemed to follow his thoughts. “I found your Shakespeare on my doorstep one day. A great one for whores, the shaker of spears. I teased him until he promised to write me over—he never stopped writing, you know. I don’t believe he could stop if he wanted to. I am told he wrote me into plays at least twice more; he swore to me that he had not met another model for his historical roles, and I enjoyed the opportunity to thoroughly educate him on my nature and bearing. His subsequent efforts will have captured me more cunningly, I am confident.”

“That’s unbelievable.” Except that it wasn’t, not anymore. What would be?

“Believe it, little brother. Our people rise and conquer all across the worlds, you know. There is no truer cradle than Gaia, for our sands bear the sweetest fruit.”

Cooper realized then that as a former Earthling, no amount of time or distance would diminish the sense of kinship she felt toward him. Would that fraternity extend to other planetary graduates? Had he joined a club so improbable in its exclusivity? This woman and he knew each other in a way so permanent it shocked him. She was famous, the original celebrity, born and died two thousand years before him, yet as far as the Lady was concerned, they were countrymen or closer; she called him brother. Never minding that she was, he suspected, the last queen of Pharaonic Egypt and he merely an overeducated, bull- shouldered American with an unhelpful attitude and zero survival skills.

She leaned closer, and the scents of flowers and poison grew stronger. “But you have not answered my question, though perhaps I press it upon you too soon: how fares your faith, child of Rome?” Her fingers stroked a rhythm on the tender side of his forearm.

Cooper shook his head and raised himself to a sitting position, ignoring his nakedness and the scrapes that pained him. He wanted to say this right. “I don’t think the people here are that different from those back home: I’m sure the need for something . . . larger . . . is universal. I just can’t imagine—given the scale of the worlds and the lives we live, apparently—what kind of god could be big enough to encompass these worlds? What’s a Christ compared to that?” He gestured at the window, where twin cerulean suns had peeked above the horizon, limning the skyline in an underwater glow.

“He was a kinder man than I expected. We who proclaim ourselves the children of gods are rarely so gentle.” Thea laughed, and Cooper realized that he felt a hint of fear from her, a constant undercurrent running just beneath her surface. He didn’t have to be a student of history to know she held plots within plots. “Or maybe you’d expect him to be the paragon of compassion—I confess I haven’t paid much attention to those who followed in my footsteps. Was he the forgiving one? I, too, was an avatar of god on Earth. I was the sun himself, Cooper, and as for me and Yeshua of Canaan, my end was no nobler than his.”

She slipped an arm from her dress and lifted one weighty breast out of its confines. Puncture wounds were tattooed across her flesh, not one pair but many, as if she had fed her chest with poison until it was ready to burst. “My children died. What use had I for milk?” She shrugged herself back into her clothes. “I gave myself to the serpents instead, and now I express milk of another kind.”

A thought occurred to Cooper. “Shouldn’t you have left those scars behind when you died? Or are they new?”

She flashed another smile—one that dazzled. Cooper wondered if she ever faltered. The woman who made a triumph of suicide. “Finally asking the smart questions, my innocent soul! You may yet survive the trials to come. Yes, that is what ought to have happened. It did happen. And happened, and happened, across a dozen-dozen spheres. My journey has not been as dignified as you might think, Cooper. I spent many lives in a haze of self-destruction, drunk on loss, and I found serpents rarer than the viper whose kiss I once thought so final.

“I have become something somewhat more than woman, thanks to those many-fevered kisses, and something less. I cannot die, or Die, and I cannot leave this place. I poisoned myself too deeply, and now I am bound to this body as thoroughly as the rest of the whores in this city.”

Cooper couldn’t imagine this woman, whose identity he had begun to accept—as a whore. Or was it that he could not imagine her as anything else? Two faces on the coin, or one? The submerged fear that veiled the Lady fluttered as if in a breeze.

“There are many diversions on the streets of the City Unspoken.” She turned the subject away from True Death. Cooper thought that if he reached out with his mind, he could hear their fear. A sea of it, and it would drown him. “You know the card game they play on the streets, which cannot be won?”

“Three Whores? Yes, Asher warned me away from it.”

She nodded. “Then you know the three flavors of courtesans who populate the bordellos of the City Unspoken?”

Cooper frowned, shaking his head. “There are three kinds of whores? I didn’t know that. I know about the bloodsluts, I mean, the life-whores, or whatever we’re calling the ones who die for a living. I saw one in the Guiselaine. I . . . heard her fear, I guess. The scratching whispers in my head. She was half-mad from it . . . poor thing . . .”

“Yes. Thing is closer to the mark.” Cleopatra’s voice was bitter. “The life- whores are people who have become little more than chattel. Here at La Jocondette, my sisters and brothers and I are something less inhuman, but no less trapped.”

“If you’re not a life-whore, then what do you . . . do?” He found no way to lessen the awkwardness of the question.

“If you will permit me, Cooper, I will show you the talents my sisters and I possess. The people of this city come to us for emotional rather than physical release, although that may become part of the work. But my ilk do more than talk, you understand? The poison in our veins provides our patrons with a seer’s insight, unveils visions and unlocks forbidden knowledge. Our succor is not the enchantment of the flesh, but the fulfillment of fate. I will awaken your secret self and hold up a mirror to your lidless eye.”

“Okay.” Cooper did not hesitate. “I mean yes, yes please. Show me my fate—if you can do it, I will dare it.” Since it was worth kidnapping me, he thought but did not add.

The Lady opened her arms and whispered something sibilant to the corners of the room before redrawing the curtains against the cobalt morning. “Once this city gleamed, although you may not believe it; I have seen it myself, in the memory of a very, very old client. He still mourns, I think. Long after the city fell into mortal hands, and thence into dust and disuse, my sisters and their peers retained the glamour of the previous ages—there were whole epochs when we plied our trade and the word ‘whore’ was all but unknown. This was before my time, of course, but La Jocondette still shined spotless white when I arrived in the city. My talents brought me here and as the years wore on I became its mistress.”

“Yes,” Cooper mouthed, barely speaking. “I see that.”

The whore who had been queen leaned over him, the redolence she wore like a shroud enveloping and intoxicating him, and all was liquid eyes and trails of hair like the lightless depths of the great celestial river, drowning and nourishing him until the corbeled ceiling opened and swallowed Cooper into vision beyond sight.

“What about the third kind of whore?” Cooper asked the beluga whale with orange fire for eyes. They treaded water beneath the surface of a sea of silk cloth, aquamarine banners and ribbons flowing past his body, curling about his limbs, and eddying off into the depths.