The Waking Engine (23 page)

Cooper could hear fear, but the Death Boys and Charnel Girls whooping as they raced each other across the rooftops of the City Unspoken felt little to none, so his access was self-limited. Maybe they owed that carefree attitude to the triumph of a successful mission; maybe it ran deeper than that, maybe their lich-lord masters had cauterized their ability to feel fear. Maybe they drank it like blood.

He could see Marvin’s face reacting to unheard information, making subtle course corrections as they sped toward the looming towers, top floors burning bright and near enough now to compete with the deranging suns. But he picked up nothing from Marvin or the others—not even brainstem moments of widened eyes and increased heartbeats as a volley of dark-clad youths pushed off a taller building; an instant of panic as a gutter- slick rope slipped through outstretched hands. Their eyes widened and their heartbeats surely quickened, but he could hear nothing.

Cooper followed Marvin’s effortless landing, touching pavement and ducking immediately into a roll that dispersed their momentum—Cooper realized these acrobatics were not his own, but an extension of the groupcompetence the Undertow seemed to possess. He also knew he should be concerned, that there was something or somethings he was forgetting to worry about, but each time his mind grasped for thoughts about Sesstri, Asher, or his own increasingly dire predicament, Marvin would squeeze his hand or press his body close, and Cooper knew only lust and an insatiable hunger for adventure, for freedom.

One of the huge chains that embroidered the city emerged from the pavement at an angle, and Marvin ran up it like a ramp. Cooper slipped on the corroded metal and stumbled, grabbing Marvin’s hand for support. His outstretched hand reminded Cooper of Nixon and his surly assistance, and for a moment he wondered what happened to the cantankerous urchin, or if he’d ever scored a shirt that fit him.

“This is dangerous,” Cooper said numbly as Marvin lifted him to his feet. What did he mean, dangerous—did he mean the skylarking? Being with Marvin, heading to whatever fate awaited him? Or did he mean the whole city? The words had come out before Cooper could process them—so much of himself was muted now, still tingling with the hallucinatory aftereffects of the queen of the Nile and the adrenaline of running with the Undertow.

Marvin scoffed. “We live above, with the real danger.” He hummed, pointing a finger to the sky. Cooper followed, and saw torchlight flickering at the topmost flights of the ruined skyscrapers. Dark clouds circled perpetually overhead, the contrails of the lich-lords and their court in the sky. There, like snow above tree line, the Death Boys and Charnel Girls sang to their lich-lovers, the ice- skinned masters Cooper half-dreaded, half-hungered to see. Everything here worships death, Cooper thought as he leapt from the chain to another rooftop, Marvin’s hand in his, and death comes in more colors than you could ever imagine. The alley beneath them looked like a brown-gray line.

Cooper! The woman’s voice had stopped crying, and started screaming his name. She was terrified, and she was alone, and she was up there. Every time he heard her voice it was like all the bells in the city ringing at once inside his skull, and between her call and the pull of lust toward Marvin, Cooper did not know who—or what—was responsible for his decisions.

“We live above,” Marvin repeated. “So we can catch their tails and fly.” Catch whose tails? Cooper thought. He knew that the Undertow served some kind of undead masters, but little more. He shivered, but followed. As they neared the towers, Cooper saw the buildings more clearly and noted that they shared the same apocalyptic diversity as the rest of the city: Here was a skyscraper that could have been ripped from Times Square, all mirrored glass and right angles, its lower reaches barnacled with darkened signs that might have once enjoyed electricity. There, a spire like a narwhal’s tooth-horn, spiral bone rising straight but perforated like a flute at its upper levels, where the wind played a lonely tune. Some were built of stone bricks and some seemingly hewn in one piece from a mountainside, some of clear or colored crystal, another that resembled a thick stem, with door- sized stoma pulsing above bristling fronds. There seemed to be no pattern to which spires remained whole and which blazed but were not consumed by fire. He saw black shapes skittering across even the burning towers—he could add fire to the list of things that the Undertow did not fear.

Cooooperrrr!

“Who built these towers?” he asked Marvin, not really expecting a response, but needing to drown out the voice.

“We don’t know. They aren’t as old as the Dome or even the Apostery, but they were here long before we were. Hestor, our leader, says that they were stolen from their worlds by a tyrant who wanted a forest of towers. Dorian says that’s bunk, but nobody believes Dorian.”

Cooper agreed with the latter assessment, although he didn’t say so— one felt the presence of age here in a way that made Rome look like Levittown. The idea that this city might once have been different was carved into his mind like a rune, and Cooper pictured the beauty that must once have reigned, and the intervening eons scribbled over that first landscape in a palimpsest of ruin: a primeval jungle; a city of light built by cousins to gods; a forest of towers; a hermetic Dome and a poisonous sky. Was everything a perversion of something greater, older? Was nothing hallowed? Not here, not anymore. Nothing could be held sacred in the City Unspoken but Death and freedom, if any difference existed between the two.

Marvin climbed a wall and stood atop it in triumph, smiling down at Cooper, who lifted his arms.

“Help me up.”

“Help yourself, Cooper.” Others streamed past them, swinging and jumping onto the exposed I-beams of the skeletal tower that rose before them, a skinless monolith. He caught some faces staring down at him as they flashed overhead, hair streaking behind them, brilliant smiles exposing lips marked with the serpent and coin tattoo. A Charnel Girl with plaited white-blond hair sailed past and landed in a crouch next to Marvin atop the wall.

“Tasty.” She leered down at Cooper before Marvin spun in place, knocking her backward over the wall with a brutal swipe of his forearm.

“And mine,” he agreed to the place where she’d been standing. “Now follow, Cooper!”

His cock and his conscience drove him on, toward the burning towers, toward the woman whose fear begged him to save her. Cooper only hoped he wasn’t dooming himself in the process.

Sesstri kept quiet as she attempted to restore some semblance of habitability to her blown-out living room. Glass scattered and blood smeared everywhere painted her house in shades of destruction, but Sesstri only paid half a mind to the disorder. Her decision to go tromping off to Bonseki-sai hadn’t been a decision at all—but rather a summons. She scolded herself for answering that summons as she threw her weight behind her overturned sofa and, grunting, righted it.

Infuriating. The woman was millions, billions of years old, and yet she couldn’t hold a simple conversation. When Alouette had first found Sesstri, when the redhead brought her to this house and gave her shelter, Sesstri had thought her a benevolent loon, perhaps indicative of the addlepated citizenry of the City Unspoken—which, after all, did love its madmen. Now, she realized the convolution of manipulation, otherness, and fragmentation that characterized Chesmarul’s manifestation in “human context.” A ridiculous term, but seemingly apt. As Alouette, Chesmarul was at once both a superior being and an inferior one. Working as both a physically embodied being and a world-spanning supermind, Chesmarul partnered with herself to cajole Sesstri into place, monitor the collapse of City Unspoken and the breakdown of True Death, summon Cooper for unconvincing reasons, hire Nixon, and bind them all together to endure who-knows-what-else. What a partnership—what an infuriation.

Chesmarul’s manifestation seemed like a personal attack against Sesstri. There was nothing human about Chesmarul, nothing to which Sesstri could relate by anything so naïvely simple as an extrapolation of scale. Despite what she said, the red ribbon was nothing like a woman.

Were all the First People so unreachable to mortals? The question seemed trivial, but it writhed in Sesstri’s gut like a worm in hot ashes. She massaged the divot between her furrowed brows and missed the simple days when all she’d needed to worry about was a filicidal father and a world that wouldn’t let anything with a clitoris read books.

Sesstri picked up cushions and tested them for intactness, returned them to the sofa, and tried to address the broken windows. “Fucking knife tears in my curtains.” She pulled together the remnants of her window treatment. “At least they’re from my knives. Idiots.”

The City Unspoken sheltered many beings that others called “gods”; the people of this city were atheist to their bones, which made it a wonderful hidey-hole for all manner of First People who could live here relatively unmolested, without attracting worship or excessive regard. The citizens of the City Unspoken treated every being the same: as chattel, corpse, or customer. The bells tolled for everyone, and only coin counted.

They tolled now, pealing through the shattered windows with the breeze. Soothing and maddening her. Sesstri hoped Cooper was safe, wherever he’d been taken. But she knew who to blame now, besides herself, which was something.

Sesstri ran her fingers through her hair, letting it fall over her face in a veil of pink. When she was a child, she had hid behind her hair like that, hoping to make herself invisible from her father and the cadre of armed men who always surrounded him. Like a peek- a-boo who never peeked, Sesstri would throw her pink hair over her face and pretend she was somewhere he could not see her. Somewhere safe, where a mother who still lived cared for Sesstri as a parent ought. She’d been told her mother died in childbirth, though she knew that to be a lie. Her father always blinked when he lied.

She didn’t see the shadow fall across her doorstep, nor see Asher wilt against the doorframe. She didn’t hear his ragged breath catch when he saw her hips and breasts silhouetted by the late morning sun. Asher stared at her out of the corner of his eye, half-afraid to be caught admiring the view and wholly afraid that the view might take herself away.

“Miss me?” he dared ask her.

Sesstri gave a start, shook her hair from her face, and glared in the direction of the voice she recognized so instantly and with such a rush of blood that it shamed her.

“A careful man would know better than to surprise me,” Sesstri answered as her eyes focused on the man who so bedeviled her, “unless he loves a knife fight.” She summoned all her frustration and assembled it into armor that protected her like a plated knight, but what she thought was: Yes, yes, oh yes.

“Your morning as dismal as mine?” Asher loped into the room and coiled himself into an armchair near Sesstri, swiping broken china off the leather onto the floor. He tried not to wince as his torn body relaxed at last, then reached up and took her hand; she let him.

Sesstri pushed away thoughts of pillows and big gray hands and lips that did more than repress smiles; that he made her want to smile was a sacrilege she allowed, but inadmissibly.

“Oh, it was plenty dismal.” Her gaze remained fixed on the view of the city through the window. Terraced hills and bell towers, wheeling flocks of birds, the twins of yellow fire that posed as today’s suns. She would not think about the heat of his hand holding her own, and she would not let him warm her.

“Tell me about it, please?” He stroked his long nose with a finger, a statue admiring its own profile.

Sesstri let out the breath she’d been holding. “One of the First People has been with me all along.”

A queer look passed over Asher’s face. “Oh?”

“Chesmarul, the red ribbon—you know of her?” He nodded and smiled. Smiled, of all things. “She exploded behind the great tree in Bonseki-sai and turned into my fucking landlady.” Sesstri sulked.

Asher absorbed the news with a kind of élan, and flashed a smile that disarmed her. “You mustn’t blame yourself, my thorny briar rose. Even the most brilliant of the Third People, which you are, can be hoodwinked by the least of the First People. And Chesmarul, she is not the least—she is one of the eldest.” He pulled her hand toward him, so gently, and moved his lips to touch the back of it. Not a kiss, just lips and skin; she could not hate that.

She did not hate it, but she withdrew her hand anyway. “She claims to have summoned Cooper, Asher.”

“Good—question answered. Sesstri.” Asher looked up at her through snowy lashes. “Listen to me. I am ancient and wise, bound to be right upon occasion, and I say not to punish yourself.”

“Horse guts.” She yielded to her desires and poured herself a finger of obsinto.

“Could this be a manifestation of guilt left over from your deception regarding Cooper’s navel?” Sesstri ignored him, and he chuckled under his breath.

Green liquor cooled and burned her throat. Better. But not another drop. When Sesstri set down her glass it was a gavel, and she heard the judgment. Her mouth formed a perfect O, and Asher found himself longing to match it with his own. “Braided tits of the Horse mother, I’ve ruined everything, haven’t I? I kept Cooper’s navel from you, I—I—How did I miss this, and how did I behave so perfectly wrongly?”

Asher steepled his fingers and hid behind them. “Because you are perfect, even in disgrace?”

“I lied to you about Cooper and then I accosted him at the Apostery and probably drove him into the arms of some Death Boy gigolo! No wonder the Death Boy kept attacking me, I interfered in a perfect little hunt. The fucking Undertow saw Cooper more clearly than I did!” She picked at the rattan arm of her chair. “Oh Asher, I am everything I promised myself that I was not.”

“Death Boy?” Asher sat up with a start, wincing at the wounds he’d ignored since La Jocondette. “What do you mean, Death Boy? You got attacked by a Death Boy too?”

But Sesstri no longer heard him. She’d retreated to memories of her stepmother, a simpering creature who reminded her strongly of Alouette. Always growing things, always nurturing something back to health, or into a better blossom. As a child, Sesstri had fantasized about what her real mother looked like, how she acted—surely she would be a vase of ice water to her stepmother’s carafe of warm milk; steel to her wool.