The Waking Engine (25 page)

“Apparently it was the new members who stabilized the Circle after their predecessors had been Killed,” she said softly. Bitzy had been engaged to Underbilly Blavatsky-Day-Louis until his Lord father had been Killed. Since his ascension she had not seen as much of Underbilly.

“It doesn’t really matter—they can sense the Murders,” NiNi said in a rare moment of clarity.

“Pardon?” Bitzy shook her head to clear it of familial ruminations.

“The Circle, um, they can tell if their Weapon has been used?” NiNi continued. “There won’t be any physical remains, of course, but they have all kinds of, um . . . frenetics?”

“Forensics,” corrected NoNo, “and yes, NiNi, I think you’re right.” NoNo sighed into the bone handle of her parasol. “All the fun will be over soon, and justice will something-or-other.”

“Well, of course they can sense it!” Bitzy proclaimed. “I don’t know why you two fret so over these little things! The lords of the Circle Unsung form the most powerful cabal in the civilized worlds. I know they’re our fathers—or mothers, in your cases, as you’re quite right to remind me— but we mustn’t let that familiarity dispossess us of our faith concerning the strength of our parents. The Circle will know as a matter of routine, and if the Circle knows, then whomever is committing these crimes will soon be passing through the Last Gate himself.” Satisfied, she leaned back into an immensity of cushioned chenille. “Or tossed into an oubliette gourd, or given over to the ossuary artisans for some lovely bonework, or—”

“—We’ll see,” said NoNo, frowning at the skirts of her yellow dress, where a seam had ripped. “There isn’t anything we can do about it, anyway. Not unless the Killer wears the same cummerbund to two parties in a row.”

Bitzy thought she detected a note of sarcasm in NoNo’s voice and had opened her mouth to lance that boil when the door banged open and her brothers Absynth and Beauregret stumbled into the parlor, red-faced and breathless.

“What in the worlds?” Bitzy demanded from her padded throne.

Absynth started to explain but his stammer was worse than usual. “H-H-He’s not th-th-there,a-a-and,and—”

“—It’s Father,” Beauregret cut in, his gold hair shining with an absurdly overburnished luster. “He’s been Murdered.”

Kaien Rosa, Journeyman Mason, walked with purpose along the hallways of the Petite Malaison, secure in his alias and the simple fact that a man in workaday livery would be beneath the notice of anyone important enough to cause him trouble, so long as he didn’t arouse suspicion among the house keepers. Sure enough, the praetors in their platinum- chased armor didn’t blink an eye as he passed by the doors they guarded so needlessly.

Less blind were the staff of the royal household who, much like the praetors, had been largely abandoned to their own devices—but who, unlike the royal guard, were not conditioned to clockwork obedience, and were therefore given more easily to mischief. The royal house hold staff were the closest thing the Dome had to native inhabitants, and that made them dangerous to a spy; Kaien hated thinking of himself that way, but what’s what is what, as his mother would say.

A secondary-grade lieutenant house keeper clicked her tongue and almost stopped Kaien for questioning, but he was rescued at the last second by a bellicose laundress with a grudge against wine on silk, who commanded the lieutenant’s attention as she barreled down the hallway.

Kaien thanked the dead gods for laundresses. Even if they did do unmentionable things to poor young men with the bad luck to stumble into one of their eve ning tipple socials. He tugged at his collar, blushing despite himself. Tipple my brown backside, Kaien thought, those women could out-drink a cellar full of plumbics! If he ran into one of the plumpbreasted washing women who’d held him hostage with their hands and hips three nights past, Kaien would die of embarrassment. It wasn’t his fault, after all—a young man’s body had only so many responses to womanflesh, bells!

Kaien had made it halfway around the longest run of corridor that skirted the keep’s ground floor when he realized with an icicle stab of panic that he’d left his hammer behind. Bending smoothly to pretend to check his bootlaces, Kaien’s mind raced to retrace his steps. He couldn’t have been stupid enough to leave his tools inside the damned royal suites, could he? A memory of smirking laundresses and breasts pushed together in his face suggested that under the wrong circumstances he could, indeed, be stupid enough for almost anything. He headed back the way he’d come as hurriedly as possible, reminding himself that to anyone walking the hallways he would seem just another square- shouldered workman, full of the energetic work ethic that men of his station were thought by the leisurely classes to possess. Not full of terror and doubt, not running back to the least permissible room in the entire bell-tolling Dome, not scurrying to retrieve an emblem of his order from beneath the most fabled, fragile treasure in the city.

A treasure he’d been too cowardly to destroy, despite his orders. Bells, he had left his hammer on the floor beneath the Dawn Stains. For such a lapse, he should be bricked up and entombed alive like the wayward masons of yore. He should be—well, his father would take care of what should and should not happen to Kaien when he was allowed to escape this gilded maze. If he was allowed to escape.

If I’d been brave enough to smash some old windows, I might already be on my way out.

The thought that the guilds had outfoxed both Fflaen and his lords brought a grin to Kaien’s face that was unbidden and, he chided himself, inappropriate. The prince thought his peacocks perfectly imprisoned, and the lords saw themselves the same way. Only the Guilds Masonic y Plumbus remembered a simple truth that neither the quality nor their myopic servant class would ever have the poor taste to discover for themselves: sewers work both ways. Sure, Fflaen had sealed all the sluice- gates and culverts maintained in the modern-era systems, as well as the calcified remnants of installations from at least two previous eras— but even a ruler of Fflaen’s rumored antiquity had gaps in his memory, especially concerning trifles like plumbing and structural integrity. Which explained why the impossibly old central cistern remained unsealed— a fellow could, with a little elbow grease, slip into the bricked-over twelfth subbasement of the Petite Malaison.

Down there, the bones of the building were of the same age as the stonework in the prince’s private chambers—Kaien’s best guess put that Paleolithic stonecraft as the remainder of a barbican or a tower-and-curtain wall around which the rest of the building had been built, like scaffolding containing a crumbling billionstone statue. Age was relative, of course—not even the masons knew the age of the Dome itself—even though the guild had maintained its superstructure since time immemorial.

Lurking inside the Dome, Kaien had turned up some funny bits of information. If his father, the First Mason, had been surprised to hear that the lords had been Killing each other, he would be doubly shocked to hear they now lived in fear of an unknown Killer among them—one who acted without any regard for the laws of the Circle Unsung. Just last night Kaien had eavesdropped upon some lads from the stables gossiping in hushed tones about a number of their friends who’d vanished and not turned up in any of the usual haunts—nor in any of the usual spots where the carcasses of casual murder were disposed. The servants feared foul play and, despite being generally inoculated against superstition by cultural inclination and the relative loftiness of their métier, Kaien had seen several make signs against evil when they thought themselves unobserved.

Then again, the guilds seemed to have more pressing concerns; the news about the Killer hadn’t changed Kaien’s latest orders—if anything, the decreasing stability inside the Dome only made his charge more urgent. But Kaien worried. If he carried out those orders, his future was unclear—the destruction of the Dawn Stains would be an irredeemable act of terrorism and, his father assured him, had only been conceived of as an act of institutionalized desperation.

Consider the institution desperate, a glum Kaien thought, kicking white dust off his boots.

Also, consider the institution dead- as-deities if he was caught and identified before he could act on his father’s late-night orders. The lords might well use their new tool to send him off to oblivion. No, it wouldn’t do to think that way; there was no reason to suspect anyone would visit the Dawn Stains and discover Kaien’s mislaid hammer—indeed, he doubted that anyone else could break into the secret chamber beneath the absent prince’s apartments. The Lords of the Circle Unsung could enter if invited, but lacked a prince to do so; the praetors could enter at any time, of course, but had no reason to do so . . . he hoped. And who else would be clever or foolish enough to break in?

He reassured himself thus as he levered open the wooden panel that led between the walls and ascended the narrow interstitial stairs carved into the rock of the keep. These ways were traveled more frequently, which was still rare enough, and even then it was usually a mason given charge over whatever repairs or upkeep needed doing. The second hidden passage was less congenial, being a crawlspace forty paces in length that broad-shouldered Kaien could barely slither through.

Kaien dropped into an interstitial space so agglutinated by age and mineral crystallization that it seemed a natural cave formation, save for the hole he’d made with his hammer, which looked out onto the shining white rock funnel and etched glass stairs of the secure passage between Fflaen’s glacial suite and the Dawn Stains below. Bells, if Kaien were caught, they’d have to invent a new punishment just for making that hole. He pulled himself onto the cantilevered stairs, thankful that the drippedwax folds of the billionstone walls helped to conceal the opening he’d bashed through the radiant rock—he hadn’t expected the suites to be quite so blindingly bright. Nor had he expected to see a pretty blond girl standing before the stains with his own hammer raised above her head, her face twisted in a grimace of mingled rage and fear.

“Stop!” she shrieked, seeing Kaien. “I’ll do it, so help me I’ll do it!”

Kaien said nothing. The girl looked terrified, and Kaien had enough experience with the opposite gender to know to be careful around frightened women wielding weapons.

“I will destroy the Dawn Stains if you take one more step,” she said through gritted teeth.

“Now, see, that isn’t something I’d be inclined to prevent,” he answered as mildly as he could, holding his hands up in a gesture of surrender. “And that’s not just because you look much nicer holding my hammer than I do.” Those slender arms and narrow waist were a vast improvement, come to think of it.

His lack of concern increased hers. “This hammer is yours?” She winced at the shrillness of her voice. Bells, that hammer looked heavy in her hands.

“I’m afraid so.” Kaien nodded. “But by all means, keep it if you like. It’s a good one, as hammers go, and I’ve got plenty more where that came from.”

She lowered the hammer and let it fall to the floor with a blessedly dull thud. Kaien frowned: her arms looked like lead weights. How long had she been standing there?

“Who are you?” the blond girl demanded.

Kaien allowed himself a chuckle. “You know, I was just wondering the same thing about you.”

She gathered herself in that self-important manner these nobles possessed. “I am Purity Kloo, and my father the Baron will Kill you himself if you so much as . . . as . . . touch me, or . . . breathe a word . . . about . . .”

“Now, there’s no need to fear on that count, Lady Miss Kloo. I think we’d both best keep quiet about where we met.” He’d inched his way toward her and now extended his hand. “Kaien Rosa, Journeyman of the Guilds Masonic y Plumbus.”

“Um. Pleasure.” Purity Kloo blushed, then seemed to recover herself. “My, but your shoulders are broad.” She winked, and Kaien retained his composure through some effort. He raised an eyebrow and swallowed a smile.

“I’ve never shaken hands with a servant before,” Purity explained. It was technically true— she’d dallied with criminals, but never with the help. Still it felt like a lie. “But, of course, you aren’t a servant, are you, mister guildsperson?”

“Indeed I am not, Lady Kloo. As it happens, I am a second-degree journeyman brother of the Guild Masonic, but here . . . here I suppose I’m a spy.” Kaien ducked his head in an honest gesture, and Purity saw crumbled stone dusting his close-cut black hair and the brown skin of his neck.

“Why in the worlds are you telling me this?” The fear rose in her throat again.

“Well, see, I told you that so you’d not worry.” Kaien made his voice sound as gentle as possible. “Now we each know something scandalous about the other.” He hoped his wink came off as conspiratorial rather than improper. Not that he’d mind a little impropriety with such a lovely thing. Her breasts were small enough to fit nicely in his cupped hands, and her dress hugged her slender hips in a most tempting way.

Purity turned away and looked out through the clear glass wall that looked out onto the wilderness at the heart of the Dome. She wrung her hands; the Groveheart spread out beneath them, all branch and birdsong.

“Lady Kloo?”

“Miss, not Lady. And it’s Purity.” She turned around and looked as if she’d made up her mind about something. “Please, call me Purity. I don’t suppose there’s any reason for us to stand on ceremony now, is there, Mister Rosa?”

Kaien shook his head. His body radiated the heat of exertion and his eyes were brown and bright, just a shade lighter than his skin. For such a strong-looking big man, his face was round-cheeked and friendly. “Now, see, if I call you Purity, I’m going to expect you to call me Kaien. It’s only fair.”

“Fine, Kaien. Now will you please explain what exactly you’re doing here, and why you’re leaving hammers all over the place?” Purity put on her best imitation of her mother, raising her brow at Kaien for intruding while acting as if she belonged nowhere else at all.

Kaien chewed his cheek. “That was an oversight on my part, Miss Purity. As for my purpose, well, it’s not so different than yours, judging from—”

He was cut off by a deafening Klaxon. Purity clapped her hands to her ears and winced.

“Run!” he yelled, grabbing her elbow and pulling her toward the stairs.

“No!” Purity yanked her arm out of Kaien’s grip and tried to make her voice audible over the shrieking horns. “That’s not meant for us!”

“Who in the worlds is it meant for, then?” Kaien looked physically pained by the volume. “Some deafened god?”

Purity shook her head. “That sound, we shouldn’t ever hear it. That’s the high alarum—and it only tolls if there’s a physical threat to the prince himself.”

“Oof,” said Kaien, scrubbing his ears with his palms. “Well, these are the prince’s apartments, so maybe—”

“No. An intruder alarum sounds completely different and would be localized. Do you feel that?” Purity put her hand against the thick window. It vibrated strongly along with the Klaxon, and outside birds rose up from the treetops in turbulent swarms. “Look at how the bells vex the birds, do you see? The high alarum rings everywhere at once.”