The Waking Engine (26 page)

She put her knuckle in her mouth but took it right out without biting. Bad habits. “It would be prudent for us to leave, yes, but this is a toppriority summons to the entire praetorian guard. Like I said, it is reserved for an immediate threat to the royal body— and the prince is absent.” She allowed Kaien to lead them halfway up the stairs, where the glowing stone muted the high alarum, somewhat.

“That’s another question I wonder if you could answer . . .” Kaien felt as if their roles had been reversed somehow, and it had happened awfully quickly.

Miss Kloo pursed her lips as if she’d thought the same thing. “Yes, well. We’re each just chock-a-block with unanswered questions, Kaien. Perhaps when there are fewer Domewide alerts screeching through every corridor, we might even enjoy a moment to sit down and answer some?” Kaien blinked but didn’t try to hide his smile. “Miss Kloo, are you always so pretty when you’re cross?”

She blew wisps of blond hair from her forehead. “Only when sirens are screeching and I’ve been caught contemplating treason by strange young men.”

“Oh, I dunno, a little treason is good for the spirit.” Kaien shrugged and wondered if there was a way he could survive the day. “But it’s a false alarm, isn’t it? If the prince really isn’t here . . .” He hurried them toward his ill-made escape hole.

“I’d like to say so, yes.” Purity frowned. “But I can’t. The lords and ladies of the Circle Unsung have stopped Killing each other with abandon now that we’ve all been properly mortified by their manners, and even if they’d started up again it would be unthinkably bad form to involve the praetors. But the truth is, the peerage has come more than a bit undone, and I can’t rightly pretend to know who is capable of what anymore.”

Kaien rubbed his head and wondered how much the girl knew. “Unless it’s the, um, Killer.”

“What?” Purity started, and hid her hands behind her back without thinking. “We were just having some girlish fun and I’m sure nobody would make a fuss over a few daughters garroted or beheaded and besides which we’re all body-bound so you know they’ll revive eventually and . . . er. You aren’t talking about my friends at all, are you?”

Kaien took her hand and shook his head with what Purity thought just might be a smile of the charmingly indulgent sort. “Not your little coterie of princesses, Miss Kloo—even the scullery hears about that. No, I mean the capital-K Killer that everybody seems afraid to talk about.” Purity wilted and Kaien mistook it for aggrievement rather than shame. “I hate to shock you, but somebody’s been Killing in secret. Two Tsengs and a mess of horsey-lads were pulled through the Gate, just this week.”

“The whole scullery? Oh, nevermind.” Purity flushed and moved on, clearly pumping Kaien for information by playing the vapid socialite— she wasn’t the best actress. “But whomever would Kill servants? And a couple of Tsengs? Are you certain?” The Tseng family were harmless buffoons, the lot of them.

Kaien nodded. “Your helpers do talk, Purity. And the lords may be keeping it quiet, but they’re terrified.”

“Of course they are,” Kaien thought he heard her mutter, and then, “You oaf.” Purity didn’t seem to like the implication that the Killer had begun taking noble victims. . . . “It could be Murder, I suppose,” she relented. “If it isn’t Circle business, if the lords decide they themselves are endangered by an outside or unknown force . . . Well, I didn’t think it could happen, but if so . . . they might call for the praetors. Bells, they’d call for their mistresses if something threatened their perfectly ordered lives.”

“Someone must be Killing out of turn.” Kaien pulled her up a few steps to the hole he’d made in the glowing stone. Better to take the anonymous route and avoid any praetors running through the hallways. “Come with me. I still think we’re not safe here. I hope you don’t mind getting a little filthy.”

Purity smiled, allowing herself to revel in the chaos as she got down on her hands and knees. So she’d choose to attach herself to Kaien instead of sabotaging the Dawn Stains; that was still more say in her own fate than she’d had in five long years. She hadn’t needed to throw away her life to effect change after all—change appeared all on its own.

“On the contrary, my strapping new Masonic friend”—she glanced up at Kaien with a brilliant and, she hoped, lovely smile—“I absolutely adore filth.”

In her reverie, Lallowë remembered running through the forest: morning light filtered through the leaves and cast the world in a yellow- green glow, but it was not the sickly and variable glow of the skies above the City Unspoken. These were her favorite moments to relive. She recalled leaping into the air, her arm reaching out to grab one branch and swing to another, child-sized hands with bony spurs of rock digging into the wood. At that, the memory shifted—light flashed brighter than any sun, and Lallowë found her child self cradled in the arm of a grownup, looking up at the face of a woman with auburn curls and a faraway expression.

It was her, the Cicatrix—not the ersatz chimera she’d become, but as she’d been before she’d ruined her body with machine obsession: lovely, not beautiful, but dainty and sweet of face. The queen wore a crown of purple- flowered kudzu, the weed that would not die. Her dress was plain cotton, but the stitching near her small, perfect breasts was of unmatched craftsmanship. The queen wore a brass cuff upon her bare upper arm, and before little Lallowë’s eyes, the brass cuff emitted a puff of white steam. It drifted away on the gentle breeze that always stirred the bower, and soon disappeared, but Lallowë felt a familiar pain stab her heart.

“Tell us again about the quickening, Mama.” The question came from a brown-haired girl with Almondine’s unreadable eyes curled up on the other side of the queen’s body.

“Why are we Third People, Mama?” Lallowë asked, “if we’re as old as time?” Little Lallowë lay in the crook of her mother’s arm, surrounded by pillows.

The queen scratched her younger daughter with an amber nail. “Our kind has always been, Lolly, but we have not always lived. In the beginning we were eternal, glacial; not immortal and vast like the First People, but akin to the trees and the river stones. Beautiful and unmoving. Unmovable. It was not until the dawn of the Third People that we first glanced down and noticed ourselves.”

“I want to be perfect,” complained Almondine from the lee of her mother. “I wish we lived at the beginning, before humans.”

“It is good to want to be perfect, my tiny nightmare. But you are wrong.” The queen shook her head and watched as another puff of steam drifted away. “We do not predate the humans any more than the air predates the wind: that is when we moved, when we began. With man. The tension between man and fey is his history and our own.”

Lolly sucked on a sugared lizard’s tail, scraping off the sweet scales with her sharp little teeth. “That’s when we came to life? For men?”

“Quickened,” corrected the queen. “Man’s birth quickened us, and we began to live. We lost a kind of ever-living purity and gained mankind’s predilection for strife and sin. If only we could return to stillness, I think, we might recover our lost grace. But then again perhaps not, perhaps forward into motion is the way—that is certainly the dancer’s way.” The queen stretched one scarred but shapely leg into the air; her love of dance was famous. “It was the way of your foremothers. Who knows where the chaos of progress will take us?”

“I don’t understand,” Lallowë muttered into her sweet tail. “Are we going somewhere?”

The dancing queen pulled both of her daughters into a tight embrace, touching noses. “Time and thorn will tell, my bloody darlings.”

A polite cough brought Lallowë back to the present. Maintaining perfect repose, adult Lallowë opened her eyes, then narrowed them.

“Every apology, ma’am.” Tam bent at the waist. She’d sent for him, but that didn’t mean she was pleased to have her thoughts interrupted. “How might I please?”

“You may run an errand.” She procured a folded note. “Fetch me a coin, boy, and a body-binding enchantment while you’re about it.”

As before, the Cicatrix had sent only the briefest of messages, a list of numbers and letters that Lallowë only half understood.

“A . . . binding, ma’am?” Tam distrusted the self-imprisonment of the nobility of the City Unspoken as much as Lallowë herself—it was unnatural, and belied a fear of losing that no fey worth her saltpeter would dare feel, let alone express.

“Did I mumble? The coin is to be a diode, of course.” she explained to nobody, a role Tam had mastered. “A diode for a new vivisistor. Has Mother been fusing magics and technologies from half a dozen worlds all along? Ordinarily I’d not be inclined to believe such nonsense, but we endure nonsensical times and so it is lunatic logic that we must follow.”

Lallowë held out her hand to give Tam the note, and he stepped forward. But she withdrew it just as quickly, and so Tam stepped back again. His fox-nosed face remained still.

“She wants me to make one? With what?” The Marchioness mused over the coin, and on the Cicatrix’s previous message about the human. “Time and thorn, Tam! Tell me, how do I fit a fatty on a face?”

“Ah? Pardon me, ma’am?”

“Or a tails. Does the side of the coin matter, I wonder? Sympathetic magic could make a difference in this. Or be irrelevant. Or cause disaster.” She tapped her nails on the parchment, thoughts flickering across her lovely face. “I speculate that the origin of the materials used has as much to do with the vivisistor’s functionality as the ingenuity of its design, though that might be overthinking it. Or under. I hate this, there are too many threads to follow, and all of them false as a Seelie promise.”

Quick as a cobra, the marchioness turned her head toward Tam, unhinged her jaw, and shot out a long, thin black tongue to sting his cheek. She moved so quickly that her lips were pressed together and pouting by the time Tam realized she’d lashed out again. He felt blood trickle down his cheek and wondered if it were Tuesday, somewhere.

“Take the note, and I will show you a wonder”—Lallowë lifted the hand with the ring of fourth silver—“of coin and cold metal, and the longest way to die.”

The day had corrupted the blue sky, and the promising morning had already miscarried into a sickly yellow noonday—the twin suns fused into a kind of angry mating, their orbs gone orange, streams of red-black plasma arcing between them as they grew steadily closer together. Another costume change for the sky above the City Unspoken.

With her shoulders cradled in one of Asher’s long arms, Sesstri stared out the window of her living room and wondered what she’d done. Somewhere out in that improbable, brachiated mess of a city Cooper needed help, urgent help, yet she couldn’t extract herself from the arms of a wounded drunk. Listing Asher’s deficiencies helped her from being swallowed by the pleasures, his touch, his breath, the warmth of his body against hers. . . .

He snored softly with his marble head turned away. Sesstri tried to pull herself together. She recalled the words of the old Winnowed storyteller holding court on her broken pillar inside the Apostery: If the Last Gate closes, we will all drown.

Sesstri turned her body into his, filling the backs of his legs with her knees, her nipples brushing the stone wall of his back, trying to decide if she should just give up and enjoy the time she had left, before the svarning took her mind away. When the plumbing of the metaverse became fully clogged—the Dying denied their Deaths backing up the pipes, so to speak, and the flow of energy between worlds, between people, all became congested. Cloudy. Deranging.

Maybe that’s why I’m feeling all of these . . . feelings.

Had that been how she’d ended up naked with Asher? It had happened so easily, Sesstri didn’t want to blame it on madness, but she didn’t know how to accept this intimacy as a part of herself.

“You?” Asher had come round to the subject of Alouette again. “You learned little, I take it?”

“Too much and too little, all in a trice,” Sesstri had despaired. “I should have gone to your whore.”

He’d cleared his throat self-consciously. “Not my whore, exactly, but yes—Cooper has some sight, I learned that much.”

“Asher, what is he? He seems so . . . mundane.”

“I think he’s becoming a kind of shaman. He wasn’t what I wanted, but he might end up that way. How can he help us restore the ability of the Dying to achieve True Death? I haven’t the slightest.”

Sesstri had bitten her lip. “What can he do?”

“I worry that the proper question is, what will he learn to do? He hears the fears of others, firstly—”

“—That’s oddly specific, if not exactly indicative of a nascent superbeing.”

“It gives him access to secrets, both consciously and unconsciously. For instance, somehow he knew . . . something he ought not know.” Asher had taken a deep breath before continuing. “I don’t want there to be any unnecessary secrets between us, Sesstri.”

Sesstri had kept very still. She still thought of Cooper as a turd, but perhaps a turd with a touch of shamanic vision. Doors were opening, and she suspected he was—somehow—the catalyst.

Asher had looked at her with liquid eyes that were far too close to her own to be safe. “Okay,” she’d said. “That’s . . . okay. Tell me.”

His body shook a little, as if he held back tears; she knew better than that, though. “I had a kid once. A daughter. It . . . the circumstances were not ideal.”

“I see.” She most certainly did not. How was this relevant?

“It was not the child’s fault, but her mother and I . . . we did not want to come together. It was forced upon us.” He’d curled his shoulders and tried to make himself as small as possible—not easy for such a long man.

“I wanted to love my daughter so badly.” Asher’s voice had threatened to break. “And we tried to forget how she came to be, but I could not stand to look at the mother . . . Chara, she found a way . . . they are Dead, now.”

That’s when it had happened; Sesstri reached out to touch Asher and noted with some amazement that she didn’t try to stop herself. He was turned slightly away from her and her hand found his knee. She decided they had both earned the truth.

“I know what it’s like to be forced, Asher. It can’t have been easy for you.” She’d flushed as she said it, and felt him stiffen. She’d nodded once, between the wings of his shoulder blades; he had scars there, too. “There’s more.” I should have had that drink. “I had a daughter, too. Had. Not from, from that encounter—that was what killed me the first time.” Sesstri spoke rapidly without wincing, half-hiding behind Asher’s back. “I had Sally during my second life, back on Desmond’s Pike. I was not a good mother.”