The Waking Engine (18 page)

“He makes you feel. He feels for you.” The beluga’s cloud-gray skin shimmered in the aquatic light and the hand bones hidden by evolution within its flippers glowed white-hot, visible through the skin. They began expanding, fingers curling in gloves of fin- flesh.

“Oh,” he said, as a school of wooden geese darted overhead. “What are you thinking, Cooper?”

He held out his hand, palm forward, and splayed his fingers. They matched the bones of the whale, which had stopped glowing along their length and now only sparkled at the joints, like a constellation. When Cooper answered, he spoke from a subsystem of himself that had perfect recall and zero irony:

“I am thinking that Gould’s Belt is not part of the natural spiral structure of the Milky Way. It spans three thousand light years and sits at a twenty-degree angle to the galactic plane. Yet it surrounds us with a ring of bright stars, and without them we would not have Orion, Scorpius, the Southern Cross, Perseus, Canis Major, Vela, or Centaurus. What astrological sign would I be if Gould’s dark matter had not impacted my galaxy? Would my story be different?”

The beluga nodded, taking notes on a pad of legal paper. “I see. And how does this make you feel?”

“I feel that these plastic stars are in my way.” Cooper brushed a mobile of toy stars away from his face as they drifted past. “And also that the gray jackass feels responsible for the dying of Death. Why would he feel that way? What has he done to close the Last Gate? It makes him so afraid, he doesn’t know himself anymore.”

“Please, go on.”

“He’s in love with her. And she loves him back, so strong, but she hates herself for it. I don’t think they will be together, even though she would give him the one thing he wants more than anything.”

“And what do you think Asher desires most?”

“A child.” Cooper raised an eyebrow at the inquisitive cetacean. His replies were reflexes. “Wait, no: a second child. Aren’t you supposed to be the one doling out the answers?”

The beluga—who he somehow knew was part Lady, part Cooper, and part something else entirely—laughed bubbles and brushed dark hair from her face. “I am just the swimmer, little brother. You are the sea.”

“That explains it, then, why I am so cold and dark and empty.”

“Is that how the sea makes you feel?” She pushed wire spectacles onto her nose with a dainty flipper. “Even though it drinks warmth and light from the sun and houses teeming billions?”

“The sky is empty and dark and cold, but it houses billions too—and teems with suns besides.” He paused. The sea was emptying, silk streamers rippling off into the distance, where they vanished. “Where is all the woven water going?”

The beluga pointed to the center of his forehead with a fin. “Back where it came from. Have you ever touched a star, I wonder, and found its furnace cold? I think we are almost out of it, Cooper. How do you feel?”

“Sleepy.” He opened his eyes and saw the Lady of La Jocondette above him, cradling him in her ample lap. Her storm of scents was withdrawing from him like a tentacled thing; it had reached inside him and cracked him open. Cooper felt like a crab sucked empty of its meat. “You did quite well, child of Rome.” The Lady smoothed his face with her fingers. “I would almost suspect you of being familiar with the narcotic haze.”

“Well, there was college.”

She shook her head. “I would advise against hiding behind your humor when unnecessary, or your intellect. I believe you have two new friends who suffer from one or the other such tendencies, yes? Do not mimic their flaws. It will only make your lives harder.”

Cooper let out a sigh that seemed to go on forever, until his lungs were flattened pancakes. “I suppose that’s good advice. Don’t be smart or funny, and don’t play Three Whores. And whatever you do, try not to fucking die. But if you do die, it’s okay, because nobody can Die, which makes the most perfect sense ever. Yep, I’ve heard some good advice today.” The Lady swept her hand toward the windows, where watery light struggled through the curtains. “Today has become tomorrow.” Cooper rubbed his face with his hands, but the Lady pulled them away and leveled an earnest look.

“There is another side to the coin of advice you’ve been paid—it has been said that a visitor to the City Unspoken may call upon the aid of three whores to guide him. Once for blood, once for wisdom, and once for love.”

Cooper blushed but felt a crabby awkwardness—was he developing an allergy to unsolicited counsel, or just sick of all the sex-worker jargon? “Asher warned me that there was no way to win that game. I think I’m beginning to understand what he meant.”

The dead queen laughed, and her throat matched the bells that rang in the city outside her bordello palace. “Asher told you that? He’s lying, of course. Any game can be won. Remember that”—she touched her chest— “when you are stripped of the choice of whether or not to play, my strapping boy.”

“I can avoid a hard hustle, Lady. I’m a New Yorker.”

“All the pride of a Roman! Three whores, I think, will help you. I have been one of them.”

Cooper paused, weighing his increasing resistance to anything tangential to bullshit against his need to absorb all the useful knowledge he could. “What else did you see inside me?”

“Every soul shines with its own brilliance, and yours is a blossom, unique. You have a strong affinity toward the call shamanic, yes? You will feel it one day, if you have not already been drawn to it. To the omphalos, yes? It means the navel, the axis mundi, the worlds-pillar. The center of the world, where all truths and lies converge. You will take its name for your own, CooperOmphale, and become something of an axis yourself. But listen to me well: this is less a position of power than it is a moment of leverage. And you have some of the seer’s sight, if you’d learn to use it—we have already spoken of your propensity for hearing the frightened thoughts of others. This is the beginning of the path of the shaman.”

She let out a slow breath, and pressed her knuckles against his cheek. “But I do not see in your possibilities the greatness to merit the attention of any of the true penates, the elder ones who call themselves the First People. Nor do I see a great worker of the art whose awakening ripped him whole from his physical reality and sent him hurtling down, down, down to me.”

Cooper resisted the urge to hang his head. “In other words, I’m still a useless mystery. An erratum.”

The Lady shook her head and pierced him with an intense look. Again, he felt her fear, distant and undefined, but which lessened whenever she spoke, “I do not understand why the gray one and the faerie noblewoman care so strongly about resolving your mystery—there are far stranger things in the worlds than one lost man. Your ash-skinned friend is one of those things, as am I. But I’d sooner tear out my eyes than betray his trust, and you yourself have earned my deepest respect and admiration, Cooper. Your answers may not be easily uncovered, but you are far from useless.”

“I am?” He didn’t feel it.

“You have retained your self-possession in the face of a reality that has crushed lesser minds. So few experience the truth of the worlds entire during the course of a single day! There is waking to new life, yes, and this is always a shock—but you are a white-hot smelting thrust into the coldest water without cracking.”

She brought him a plate from a credenza by the wall, all curves and curls and coils of venomous sight. “This resilience is perhaps the only quality I see in you that might qualify for greatness. Let us appreciate that irony for a moment, before your monochrome savior storms my keep and rescues you from the torments of luxury. Pastry?”

Asher dripped down the sentinel wall and swung onto the branches of a papery sycamore, flipping head over heels before grabbing a lower branch and pushing himself off, swinging his feet in a backward arc, and hooking his knees around on a still-lower branch. He hung there for a moment, upside down, and scanned the grounds of La Jocondette through inverted eyes to see if he’d been detected or triggered any sort of alarm, then unlocked his knees from the bough and allowed himself to drop headfirst to the manicured lawn before bracing his impact with an arrowstraight handstand. As he spun forward into a machine-perfect landing, Asher wondered if anyone could acquire dexterity like his if they had lived as long—and as dangerously—as he had, or if acrobatics were simply another of his natural gifts. He couldn’t remember ever feeling clumsy, but who could say what details of his long-distant childhood had been eroded? The worlds themselves had changed. His family, his people. Chara, for instance, wherever she was. Would he even recognize her as the sister who once chased him through Anvit’s Glade? She would surely not recognize the gray- skinned beggar he had become.

Poor Chara.

The lawns of La Jocondette always did remind him of home— something in the symmetry of the fruit trees and their shaded lanes, or the flower beds that seemed to float like the tips of icebergs across the immaculate grass. All the white stonework, too, the white bricks and the steepled rooftops. So quiet and clean and well-lit in the night.

The door leading inside from the garden was ajar. He poked his head in and saw no one. Strange. La Jocondette no longer turned as much business as the less tony brothels, certainly not with most of the city’s wealth locked up inside the Dome, but there should be at least a few morsels lounging about, waiting for those seeking their particular custom—dissolution and dreams in the arms of a poison-whore.

Dashing up the spiral stairs to the second level where bedrooms branched off from three plush brown-carpeted corridors, he found one room empty. And another. Another. Another.

Panic prickled his spine, and Asher called out. No guards came running. No whores looking shocked or annoyed at having their work interrupted. Asher possessed a bloodhound nose for manipulation, and he smelled a skunk. La Jocondette appeared empty: neither Cooper nor the Lady whose profile had been so crudely inked on the broken chip were anywhere to be found.

Outside a blue morning dawned—the window faced west but the buildings across the canal were washed in cool light. Including one narrow building, once a townhouse, now part of a row of houses annexed by La Jocondette as additional space for guests or special events. The brothel hadn’t seen that much custom in some years, so the annex had lain fallow— but now a candle burned in a window on the third storey, and below it a figure in black shimmied up the colonnade, inching toward the lit window.

Asher watched the shadow of the Lady of La Jocondette through the distant glass, so far across the grounds and the canal; he fingered through his pocket the cracked chip that bore her likeness. What had Oxnard intended, by giving it to him? Had it been a tip, or a trap?

Cooper heard Asher’s howl from across the water. The cry of frustration was a primal sound, bell-clear in its purity, and even though Cooper had known Asher for less than twenty-four hours he recognized the gray man’s cry. Leaping off Thea’s bed, Cooper shook away the lethargy that still combed its poisoned fingers through his mind—he pulled the lace away from the window and spied Asher across the canal, standing in the gardens of La Jocondette. His lanky body was bent back in dismay, the smoke of his face raised to the silvery sky, staring up over the water into the window where Cooper stood. With still-watery vision, Cooper thought he saw dark puppets emerge from the shadows and surround Asher.

“What is Asher doing all the way over there?” he asked, still clearing his head of the puppet- show Thea had shown him. Sid and Marty Krofft have nothing on fucking Cleopatra, he thought to himself.

“Why,” began Thea, crossing and uncrossing her legs as she reclined on her chaise longue, upholstered in a chamois the same watery blue of the rising suns, “I believe he’s loosing a scream of unbridled rage.” She smiled.

The bitch smiled. And instead of infuriated, Cooper found himself mollified. Somehow. He could understand how his hostess had captivated an epoch of history; it wouldn’t have posed the slightest challenge, not for her.

“But. You said my savior, my monochrome savior . . .”

“I did.” She nodded with just a blush of enthusiasm, like he’d hit upon a half-hidden truth the Lady secretly wanted to share, and the fact that Cooper knew it was an act did nothing to diminish the effect of her performance. “And I did not lie to you once. Be patient a moment, CooperOmphale, and wait for life to catch up to accuracy. It happens thus, sometimes.”

But the puppet show had ended—those were thugs out there, fighting and greatly outnumbering Asher—and Cooper turned his back to the window, feeling his indignation rise as he faced the Lady. He found his footing again against this woman—this queen—who must not be trusted. Cooper shook his head and scolded himself. Is that the understatement of the goddamn year. Christ on a multigrain cracker, you don’t let Cleopatra lull you into a sense of security, not unless you’re looking for a handful of bastards and a dependable excuse for suicide!

“I never asked you who kidnapped me, did I?” Cooper kept his voice level. He might be overmatched by two thousand years and a handful of empires, but he intended to use his inclination toward the male sex in his favor. He would not be seduced again, now that he knew who he faced.

“I never asked you who attacked me and Asher, and Sesstri. Why is that, Thea Philopater? Tell me why my assault and abduction so conveniently slipped my mind after I awoke in your psychoactive brothel?”

A shoulder raised, lowered; the Lady didn’t need to shrug when the stirring of her every joint was choreography. “Damage to the head can have all sorts of effects, Cooper,” she purred, “and it’s fair to say that you might have been a tad overwhelmed.”

He shook his traumatized head. “But didn’t you just finish telling me about my remarkable mental resilience? My retention of sanity in the face of this, um . . . waking absurdity?” he continued, though still very much in awe of the pedigree of the woman he addressed. “After all I’ve seen recently, one dead Egyptian doesn’t exactly overwhelm. Try again.”

“I have not lied to you once, CooperOmphale.” Thea caved, tipping her hand to Cooper with two thousand years of rehearsed grace. Of course she mustered grace: Cooper doubted she could break wind without arousing jealousy from Zephyr himself. “Please remember that when you dole out your justice at the end of this shadow play.”