The Waking Engine (27 page)

“Where is she now?” Asher had asked, turning toward her with an expression both sad and hopeful.

Sesstri had shrugged. “Wouldn’t a good mother know?”

The living room filled up with silence, and Sesstri and Asher sat there, her hand on his knee, Asher still hugging himself. They were lost and sad, but they were not alone.

At last she’d said what they knew to be true. “If we don’t help Cooper, Asher, nobody will.”

He had leaned in. “There isn’t anything or anyone I wouldn’t sacrifice for a moment together with you, Sesstri. I hope you know that.”

She’d nodded.

“No one will ever hurt you again, I will make sure of it.”

She’d wiped her eyes. “You either.”

He’d leaned in closer still and kissed her. His lips felt so soft above his stubbled chin. “Cooper. Yes. That’s who . . . we have to save . . .”

Asher nodded without breaking the kiss. “A moment for ourselves, even when hurried by the end of all things and imperiled friends . . .”

“Ourselves.” She’d breathed the word. “Just a moment. But, oh . . . yes.”

Asher had cracked his knuckles and cupped her face in his enormous, warm hands. “Optimae Manfrix solves another riddle.” She’d scowled to hide a blush; he’d never used her academic title before. Then he’d kissed her again, and didn’t stop until she slipped into his arms, strong despite his wounds, and allowed him to hold her.

Cooper understood the power of the lich-lords the moment he crossed the threshold into their territory: the seething clouds swallowed the sky and, suddenly, undeath saturated the air and earth around him. He’d crossed into another world; the light from the day still lit the blocks on all sides, but within the perimeter of those clouds roiling overhead, a curtain was drawn and day became night. Cooper had no firsthand experience with the undead but could feel the energy of the unliving pouring from the sky in a deluge. For a moment, the sick song of the lich-lords drowned out the golden voice of the woman whose ghostly sobbing called him forward, to the top of that mad darkness. The sky swarmed with lich-lords, black contrails against a dark sky. If death was the answer to the question of life, then undeath was the question reframed to turn the answer into a corollary: an existence fueled by the energies that brought an end to the living. Death rewritten as life.

Is that freedom?

The scrambling figures of Death Boys and Charnel Girls dashed toward the cluster of towers directly beneath the spiraling black clouds, and when Cooper pushed forward, the woman’s voice returned like a shaft of sunlight. It pierced him. Vaulting atop an exposed girder, Cooper clawed at his ears.

He stumbled and fell from the girder. It wasn’t a long fall and trash absorbed most of the impact, but it dazed him, and he could do nothing but listen to the dueling musics that clashed over his head, one sunlit aria drowned out by a symphony of grave dirt and shadows. The faces of Death Boys and Charnel Girls flickered across his vision, concerned or curious or scornful, but he couldn’t make his eyes focus properly. He followed the lines of life and death until they reached a crescendo, and Cooper’s body spasmed.

Then he left his body altogether.

Like a gunshot, Cooper’s senses erupted from his body with bullet speed: sight and sound soared out of his skull and wheeled away, past the variable sky, piercing the rind of the world to flow into a kind of dimensionless non-space, an empty fullness that blanketed the universes and hid them from one another. Flattened and ghostly, Cooper flowed through the connective tissue of the metaverse. His disembodied consciousness rattled through impossible places, and time was his darling—he could soar through the nothingness as he pleased and only picoseconds passed in the real world.

The real world? Cooper’s ghost scoffed. The real world is a fairy tale.

Seven spheres of light appeared, orbiting a common center. In the same way he knew anything here, Cooper knew that the spheres were only spheres in the most abstract sense, and that their orbits were less actual than illustrative, and that their common center was one of identity rather than mass.

Still, the spheres beguiled him with the tactile immediacy of physical objects, and he watched, fascinated, as they coruscated with the colors of life: yellow sun and green leaf and the steely refractions of rippling water. These were worlds, universes, realities—seven discrete realms of existence that were home to a single culture and thus linked by bonds more abiding than the laws of physics.

How do I know that? Cooper wondered, though he already knew the answer. This is the work a shaman does, isn’t it? Walking between worlds, visiting the worlds beyond death for the good of the living. He could blame the liches and their captive, if he returned to his body.

Cooper drifted closer to the Seven Silvers, hearing the name as the worlds drew his focus, until something tugged at him, clawing at his . . . body? No, not body—he had no body here, just information coded into the ether—signal was the right word. He was a signal. And the signal that was Cooper had just found a receiver, something voltaic that sucked him into the closest sphere with a magnetic attraction. Helpless to resist or control his movement, Cooper saw only flashes of the world he entered: streaking past brown skies crossed with teal lightning; a dark hollow looming like an impact crater; a coiled serpent with a woman’s torso; a nest of restless synthetic spindles; black claws so thin he could see the sky through the blades, like obsidian. Then Cooper was gone, an echo inhabiting a machine.

Her Majesty the Cicatrix, Regina Afflicta, Matron of the Seven Silvers, Childe of Air and Darkness, and Queen of the Court of Scars had been partially inorganic for centuries, continuing a trend that had begun as minor enhancements, barely more than accessories that flattered her vanity with brass and coke. The fashion had started as an ironic condescension toward that least enchanting of mortal endeavors, science, but had sublimed into a practice that eclipsed the mystical arts before absorbing them entirely.

Now the queen lifted her massive helmed head and sniffed at the air. It was her native element, but the winds had discharged unusual energies of late. She smelled nothing except the dried loam and weeds that bedraggled her barren enclosure. Ozone, when the lightning hit, arcing down her coiled spine.

The Court of Scars had been excavated to accommodate the queen’s ever-increasing bulk: gone were the moonflower vines and mountainous rhododendrons that once adorned the bower of her court, and the wild cress that had carpeted the earth had long ago been trammeled by the sinuations of the royal carapace. Only the bounding ring of sentinel oaks that surrounded the court remained, skeletal. The sky flickered with lightning that followed straight lines and perpendicular branches, as if the clouds themselves had been seeded with circuitry.

The Cicatrix yawned a silent scream, silver grills cracking apart to let her tongue taste the air.

From this nest the she had ruled an alliance of seven universes for ten thousand years, faerie worlds united beneath her banner ages ago by charisma and threats and a willpower that had extinguished suns. Today, none of her vassals would recognize the beauty who conquered them clad in naught but glee and blood: her remainder lay coiled like a dragon atop its hoard, dark graphene and vinyl stitched together with rivets and industrial adhesive, her tiny dancer’s body hacked apart and stuffed inside armor crafted into the shape of a great serpent. Grasping appendages studded her length and facilitated some movement, but for the most part the queen had sacrificed her mobility to her technological addiction: there was always more machine to add to the monster.

Her arm jerked of its own accord, a vivisistors shorting out briefly while its occupant tried to communicate. Her little engines spoke to her, an annoying and persistent defect that manifested throughout her systems, and she’d learned to ignore the occasional errant impulse.

“M1sstresss mine!” called out the pixie powering the servo where the Cicatrix’s shoulder joint had been, streaming verse through wiring that terminated inside her skull. “It sings to us again from the garden of El Cíudad Tácito, and it brings us a visitor::login:guestnotfound! Gray bird sings a harmony, m1lady, and the navel of a11 worlds inhabits us as 1t s0 sadly singsss! Your Light Music Machine, my qu33n::login:xxMyQueenSoScarre dxx . . . Your Golden Appppple! In tone s0 sad, in voice s0 ancient, in volume 5o greatttttt—”

Despite the slithering length of her abdomen, the queen’s torso remained relatively humanoid, corseted in metal and plastic but still a recognizably womanly shape; she’d replaced her auburn curls with a towering headpiece of shining black, twin horns like a giant dung beetle twisting toward the sky while braided cables cascaded down the back of her neck, connecting her helm to the bulk of her machine components.

The Cicatrix kept one hand unadorned to proclaim her fey heritage to any being unlucky enough to be brought before her, and she raised that hand now, demanding silence. Proprioceptive relays made verbal communication with her systems unnecessary—the pixie in her shoulder fell silent with a whisper of static terror. Unaware that Cooper surged through her systems, the Cicatrix bared her metal teeth in a silver smile.

The vivisistors suspended within her polyvinyl chassis transfixed only the rarest of fey creatures—a perversion of loyalty kept the Cicatrix from employing any other kind of servant, within or without her body. She knew that Lolly had uncovered the truth about the magitechnical composition of the vivisistor design, but the child remained ignorant of the number and composition of her mother’s upgrades: Lolly might well revolt if she knew that her own little fey cousins had been used to power the queen’s vivisistors, or how aggressively the Cicatrix had been upgrading herself since her daughter’s deployment to the City Unspoken.

Something Cooper-derived bootstrapped itself into a state of minimal awareness, flickering between vivisistors that wound along the coiled length of the faerie queen, which looked something like an ink-black subway train wound up in a curl, with a woman at one end. A mile-long mermaid machine, black as coal and flickering with Tesla arcs. He struggled to gain consciousness and found himself by focusing on his host’s fears, piggybacking across her thoughts. Alien thoughts. As he incorporated himself into her cognition, the active part of Cooper calmly observed that the mind he inhabited seemed to consider itself the mother of the Marchioness Terenz-de-Guises, and that the mind belonged to a monster. Elsewhere, Cooper’s dormant majority screamed.

But the part of him taking this electronic spirit walk acknowledged the maternal horror and moved on, following the narrative of the queen’s fear that Lallowë Thyu had not improved upon some kind of programming language that the Cicatrix herself had improvised. The queen— and therefore Cooper also—considered that language, which she used to program her vivisistors.

Her code was by necessity feral and half-formed; there were no guides to this work, and all of her usual resources were useless: no epic poetry recited in the Court of Scars detailed the recursive spells of If-Then and Let-X-Equal that would breathe true life into the vivisistor design. Yet she hoped that Lolly, possessed of the combined gifts from her human father and the compulsive genius that so resembled the queen’s own, would discover the language to unlock the potential of the technology— and emerge with a vivisistor that would be a far more significant device than the half- aware batteries that currently powered her armaments.

Armaments that were needed to keep the eons at bay, as well as to provide the Cicatrix with new and more appealing diversions in these latter days. The true Wild Hunt was long gone, fractured and refractured across time as well as space, and although its denizens had seeded a hundred cultures of barbarism and wild magic, the rule of the Unseelie Court was a thing of near prehistory. The Unseelie champion—the Queen of Air and Darkness—died ages before with no successor, and no one remembered her true name to summon so much as a ghost, not even ancient fairies such as the once- spindly dancer, now corseted with metal and braided with optical cables, who had become a queen in her own right.

Farther down the length of her body, another vivisistor bucked as its prisoner whispered through the wires: “All we caged birds hear the same song, my queen. And you hear it t00, while the Omphale gnaws through your sacred fruit. . . .”

She lashed out with a pulse of electricity that whipped through the inside of her body and silenced the offending device, but the trapped thing was correct, she could feel them out there, across the worlds—the other vivisistors, the old ones. She’d begun to sense them years ago, but as her systems improved so too did the signal—old machines, vivisistors that predated the rise of the Third People.

That shouldn’t be; yet somehow every vivisistor in existence—so far as the queen could determine—was linked together with its peers via some oblique tunneling protocol into a background network she could not disable, and while this latent network didn’t interfere with her benchmarks and diagnostics, a persistent hiss of feedback lingered no matter how she configured her modules. She could still hear the others, even the miniscule surveillance drone she’d hidden with Lallowë years before. And the one she’d sent, only recently, with the dragonfly inside— she’d heard that dragonfly die, and it had disquieted her.

The Cicatrix could hear them all, and Cooper heard them with her. One vivisistor in particular loomed larger than the rest, its song a constant presence in the back of the queen’s head, and its energy signal shone brighter than a hundred stars. A golden apple that dazzled her from somewhere within the City Unspoken. It glittered with a greater concentration of power than she’d ever witnessed, and even though it hung like a golden fruit just out of her reach, it fed her with its light.

Vivisistor? The ghost of Cooper scanned the queen’s thoughts and marveled. How am I here, and how am I hidden inside this creature? He could feel the pain of sentient beings close by, calling out for peace. Little winged men and cat-paw ladies; smooth- groined nullos and butterflycrotched oni: all in pain, each begging for death.