The Waking Engine (34 page)

They will destroy me, Cooper knew, watching Hestor approach. They will send me somewhere small and dark and I will scream there until my voice is paper and my bones turn to rust. To his right, the rain poured sheer and straight past the lip of the roof to the ground, so far below. It might as well be bottomless.

“Perhapsss you can explain to usss why your ssscheme failed, Hessstor?” lisped the lich-lord in a dry voice.

“Lord?” Hestor showed the first hint of doubt about the Lady and her fate. He had colors, but Cooper couldn’t make out the shape.

“She is with usss no longer, Hessstor. She is gone, forever. We were asssssured that thisss was impossssible—our agreement with our Unseelie allies, in fact, was predicated upon thisss fact. Can you tell usss why the Lady isss Dead?” Was the lich-lord smoking a cigarette? It was, a brown cigarette smoldering in a black holder. It waved the opera-length Bakelite like a wand. “And can you tell usss how?”

Hestor shook his head in denial. “That’s impossible, Lord! She cannot Die, she is the mother of life without Death, who will found your dynasty of freedom!”

“Neverthelessss”—the lich shrugged its padded shoulders and lifted its gloved hand in a gesture of feigned helplessness that reminded Cooper of nothing so much as a fashion model draped in black cashmere— “Dead she remainsss.” It waved Hestor away like a caloric canapé.

“But this whole thing was her . . . it was her idea!” Hestor didn’t understand. Tonight was his triumph, and he was covered in Cooper’s blood to prove it.

The lich made a noise of disappointment that sounded like a hundred beetles clacking their mandibles. “Do you really believe that, Hessstor? Do you really?”

“Believe what, Lord?”

Oh god, Cooper realized with a feeling that was indistinguishable from despair or exultation, Hestor has no clue what’s really going on, does he?

The lich flicked its electric eyes toward Cooper and gave the ghost of a nod. “Your chattel understands more than you do, my proud sssubordinate.” It laughed, like parchment shredding. “You missstake a pawn for the queen.”

Lolly’s mother. If Thyu had ordered him kidnapped and brought to the Lady for analysis, then whoever had summoned the Undertow to La Jocondette had been clever, brave, and well- informed enough to betray her. From his time inside the Cicatrix, she seemed the most likely party to successfully outmaneuver Lallowë Thyu. The lich nodded again, and Cooper found himself almost incontinent at the prospect of this dried, molted thing deferring to him when it should by all rights have been devouring him instead. The last petal flew off the flower in his head.

“I don’t understand,” Hestor said, almost whining, scrambling for some foothold of understanding. “The Lady will be our queen, Lord. She is the instrument of our victory.”

“Oh dear.” The lich wedged its long cigarette holder in the space of a missing tooth and removed the glove covering one of its hands, tugging off each finger of the soft leather, one at a time. Beneath lay bones like rusted metal ore. “I thought I heard you contradict me.”

Hestor’s eyes grew wide as saucers, and Cooper heard the inarticulate wail of fear from inside his head. The lich smiled with its eyeless eyes. “Sssurely I was missstaken?”

“But, but—” Hestor whined like a spoiled child, and the lich-lord reached out with a limp wrist and backhanded the Death Boy chieftain off the rooftop. Hestor flipped once in midair, his feline reflexes and bristle of tawny hair giving the impression of an abused alley cat—his eyes locked onto Cooper’s for half a second, and then he was gone, trailing a scream.

“Heheh.” The lich rasped out a papery giggle, then coughed up something wet and charcoal- gray that sizzled as it landed on the rain- slick roof. “Maybe Hessstor will find more sssuccesss in his next life. Marvin, do we sssuffer incompetenssse?”

Marvin stepped forward with an almost military, regimented posture. “No Lord, never.”

“Lady,” the lich-lord said. The word was both a command and a question.

“I—I don’t know, Lord. I was the last to see her, wasn’t I, Cooper? She was fine when I left her, wasn’t she, Cooper?”

“Really, Marvin?” The ease with which the lich had unemployed Hestor stirred Cooper from his stupor. “Are you really stupid enough to ask me to confirm your fucking story?”

Marvin said nothing, his fists balled and his jaw tight.

Cooper turned to the lich, less afraid of it now. “To be honest, Miss or Mister Lich, I don’t remember any lady at La Jocondette,” Cooper said, and almost smiled. “But I’ve spent enough time with Marvin to know how much he likes to lie.”

“I sssee.” The lich tutted cigarette smoke and made to leave, looking toward the ever-churning vortex above. It sounded merely disappointed, and seemed to Cooper to have expected nothing more from its living followers.

Something shifted below—Cooper sensed the change. There was a woman made of bruised light who felt herself . . . return. As if a piece of her that had been hiding suddenly returned, slid into place and ignited. Meanwhile the Undertow cowered before their god. Cooper held his breath, and didn’t dare to hope.

“Lord?” Marvin begged. The lich inclined its head a single degree. “Thank you, Master. Your freedom is my freedom, Master. Forgive me.”

“Oh good,” shrugged the lich, drawing its wool wrap close about its overpadded skeletal shoulders and rising a few feet into the air. “Yesss, yesss—freedom. Whatever. Do as you please with them, Marvin. You’ve earned it, haven’t you? Yesss, earned it with your warm body.” The lich swept its bare hand to indicate the cowering Undertow. It rasped a noise that resembled a chuckle. “They are yours for as long as you can keep them.”

Suddenly a staccato burst of exploding glass ripped through the night as something blew out all the windows on the floor of the harem beneath them. The building shook, its embedded circuitry strobing light in frenzied bursts, and the roof was thrown into a chaos of pure golden light. Cooper heard a cry that sounded something like a bird and an insect making whalesong together, but so loud it nearly concussed his skull— then, through tears, he saw a smear of light rocket into the air at enormous speed, hurtling away from the tower in an arc of sun-bright wings and a buzzing, keening wail.

RunFlyScreamExplode! ExplodeScreamFly, RunCooperRun! EscapeEscapeEscape!

Cooper caught his breath—it was her, the aesr. It had worked. Somehow, against any logic he recognized and yet making a perfect kind of sense, his gambit had worked: she had freed herself. Cooper laughed out loud, drawing baleful glances from the agitated Death Boys and Charnel Girls, especially Marvin—who had seamlessly assumed Hestor’s hauteur. It did him little good, though—the Undertow were in chaos.

The lich remained an intractably still figure, hovering on the tips of its toes while its minions surged around it. Cooper watched it following the bright path of the freed aesr with its eye- sparks: she flew straight as an arrow toward the Dome. From the lich, Cooper sensed a colossal ambivalence that dwarfed them all, and also a seething, shocked despair.

Then a screech from the far corner of the roof cut through the confusion, and Marvin whipped his head around in annoyance. The lich remained implacable while a streak of gray fury hurtled across the rooftop. Asher had escaped his captors and his face was twisted like a granite gargoyle.

“You sick fuck!” Asher cried, his eyes skewering the lich.

Cooper cheered. The lich wafted behind Marvin.

Asher transformed into an arc of smoke-colored light, he moved so fast. Cooper saw a gray hand chop in an arc upon Marvin like the blade of an axe, splitting the air with its speed, and the newly appointed Death Boy chief’s left shoulder fell away from his body, his torso split between neck and collarbone in a jagged tear that cracked his ribs open all the way past his sternum. Cut nearly in two, Marvin sank to his knees wordlessly, fountaining blood from his mouth and the exposed tissue of his lung, then collapsed to one side, blood foaming over his pretty, petty tattoos.

Not sparing a glance for its butterflied human shield, the lich withdrew.

Asher stumbled forward in pure momentum, feral and unaware of his surroundings. His leg gave out and he stumbled, collapsing, as Sesstri broke free of her distracted captors and rushed to Asher’s side. Cooper’s perception of time slowed to honey: Asher’s tears and spittle frozen in midair, an arc of diamonds, while the tall man tumbled into Sesstri’s outstretched arms; the scholar’s face was a mask of confusion, her hair streaming sideways with the roaring wind, eyes caught between her crazed lover and the wreckage that had recently been Marvin the Death Boy, Marvin the pain-bringer, her prophecy concerning his motives come true in the worst possible way. The other Death Boys and Charnel Girls fell back from the three survivors as if caught in the radial blast of a shock wave, sudden weakness spilling from their eyes, huge and liquid in the permanent night.

For half a minute, Cooper just stood there and stared as Marvin died, feeling the razor kisses on his back burn and bleed, and when the Death Boy’s lips turned blue, Cooper knelt and lifted Marvin’s head to whisper, “I told you I was sorry, you waste of skin. I told you it wasn’t over. Wherever you wake up next, you remember this New Yorker asshole, you remember my grin over your useless forgettable carcass and my promise, a shaman’s promise: no matter how far you run, life will always be wasted on you. I’ve crossed worlds and found you nothing more than a disappointment.”

Then he rolled Marvin’s corpse off the edge of the roof into the empty air and called after it, “Tonight you fly with the Death Boys!”

He swiveled toward Asher and Sesstri, who crouched in each other’s arms, gaping at Cooper. Did they have colors too? Somewhere inside him, the Cooper of three days earlier still existed, horrified, but those hours had altered him—some components upgraded, others removed and replaced with death and magic and knowledge. He was not quite the same machine as the man who’d woken up on a hill of yellow grass, not anymore. “I’m ready to be rescued now,” Cooper said, turning his ruined back on the others and walking with a leaden gait toward the stairwell in the center of the roof. “If we’re done killing whores for the night.”

Lord Senator Mner Bratislaus had Died on the privy, tangled in his trousers, trying to shit and survive at the same time. He may have known his Killer, or at least was not entirely ambushed, for he had not triggered the Domewide alarum. That had been the servants of half a dozen lords and ladies, after word spread of the lord senator’s Death. Any other lord mightn’t have been discovered for days—the Dome covered an area vaster than most huge cities, and Circle business went unquestioned by all. Cliques of lords routinely vanished for weeks at a time under the auspices of the work of the Circle Unsung, even though they usually limited themselves to whoring, gambling, or fucking one another in an inebriated haze. The lord senator’s personal quarters were scrubbed as a matter of routine when he could not be found.

Mauve Leibowitz, who knew the answers to many questions and intended on discovering the rest, stood in the middle of the lord senator’s library with her hands on her hips and outrage blazing behind her eyes. Steel-gray hair piled atop a face like a warlord gave Mauve an air of authority that few of the ladies at court could match. Worsted midnight wool flecked with white and gold hugged her curves, roomier in the sleeves and with a high, loose collar—it was not hard to see how she commanded the respect of the Circle. One of nine women on the ruling council of twenty-three families, Mauve held legendary status. She’d been one of few to stand up to Fflaen when he boxed them in; she’d debated the Guildworks United to a stalemate after they proposed a tertiary docking tithe; and she’d been the only member of the Circle to stare down Mner Bratislaus after the second wave of Killing, when the Circle seemed poised for civil war and the lord senator wracked with Deathlust. Now not only was the insufferable bastard dead, but she had to wade through the shit he’d left behind, both figurative and literal.

Dead gods, Lady Leibowitz lamented, is it too much to ask that a man’s excrement vanish with his corpse? Two dressing rooms and a cedar closet separated the library from the privy, and still the odor lingered. She made a mental note to remember to eat lightly if she ever suspected the Circle of plotting a water closet assassination against her. There were worse things than Death, indeed.

Mauve had hated the man, and had even privately considered using the Weapon against him despite the brinksmanship that forced the Circle back into armistice, but this was travesty. Mner’s Murder could undo everything, all the backroom bargaining and bullying which had occupied her for most of the past year. That the sitters of the Circle had, after eons, used the Weapon against one another had been profane enough— a profanity that she and a handful of others had barely managed to contain with a lie: that the Circle had discovered the Weapon only recently, and been so intoxicated by its power that they’d indulged in not one but two full-blown orgies of Murder.

A crock of godshit, but there you have it. Her womb conspired to produce only imbeciles, so Mauve secured her legacy through political means. In this, she did not consider herself so different from her peers, although she wished she had conceived more children— surely if she spawned a hundred idiots one of them would stumble into usefulness. Better than the pair of limpid swans she called daughters: she often struggled to look at Nonette and Nilliam without wishing she’d tossed the twins into a canal as soon as she’d expelled them from her body.

Purity Kloo, who sat abashed and slightly blinded in a tall leather armchair, would have made a much less objectionable daughter. The Baron had spoiled her, of course, but Mauve would have raised her to be a razor blade and not a truant.

Mauve took a pull off her long, thin bone pipe and tutted smoke as she closed the curtains against the brilliance of the Petite Malaison. Today its bones had begun to shine like they’d used to, but Mauve suspected something worse than the return of Fflaen. Dour times.

She turned her thoughts back to the world she could control and considered the possibilities. She found herself hoping that the Murderer sat on the Circle, although that would mean a rogue lord or lady, and that would breach the armistice and threaten to send the Circle into round three of self- annihilation. She’d seen too many noble families purge themselves of undesirables and rivals already: now they were weakened nearly to the point of dissolution. Too many new faces on the Circle, young heirs who couldn’t possibly carry the responsibility, and too few old friends or enemies upon whom she could rely. Her people had seen more change in the last few years than they had in the uncounted millennia before Fflaen confined them to the Dome. Although now that the billionstone shone again, perhaps something could be done about all of that.

Still, better the Killer be a rogue Circle member than the alternative—if anyone outside of the Circle Unsung had the Weapon, then they were all quite thoroughly rogered.

The greatest legacy of the aesr would destroy the city those long-lost First People had built. Fflaen deserved no less, for all he’d done to preserve the legacy of his race, but saving her house took precedence over punishing the aesr prince, wherever he’d fled—or turned up. Despite the sins Lady Mauve had committed herself—she was no less guilty than the rest of the Circle— she did not wish to witness the destruction of her home.

She saw Elisabetta and Nilliam skid into the room red-faced and out of breath. Elisabetta had been crying, but Nilliam merely stared at her mother with heavy-lidded eyes that peeked out from beneath her ridiculous sideways hat. She dressed like a clown: batik, in burgundy?

Mauve met her daughter’s dead-eyed gaze. “Where is your sister?”

“Nonette, Mother?” NiNi fiddled with her hat, and started up with her humming.

“Do you have another sister?”

“No, Mother.”

Bitzy looked fit to dissolve at any moment, so Mauve steadied her with a gold-barnacled hand. “I’m sorry, Elisabetta. He was gone before anyone knew he was in danger.” That was a kind lie—she knew more of the lord senator’s last few meals than of his Death, only that it was final, and in the loo.

Bitzy nodded and tried to act like an adult. “Thank you, Lady Leibowitz. I . . . I appreciate your kind assistance. As for NoNo, she’s been having skirts fitted all morning, after her dancing lessons, bright and early. She’ll come running in any minute, I’m certain of it. NiNi . . . ?”

NiNi shrugged and hopped up onto a side table where, effort expended, she closed her eyes at once. “Clothes people” was all she said. Bitzy sat herself on a sofa near Purity and fixed her eyes on the floor. She’d gone into standby mode, poor thing.

“What about clothes people, Nilliam?”

NiNi buzzed a raspberry at her mother, eyes still closed as if napping. “They couldn’t find her. The clothes people. So I told them where to find her. NoNo. I’m helping.”

“And where did you tell the clothes people to find your sister, Nilliam?” Mauve Leibowitz must be used to pulling sense out of the senseless, Purity thought.

NoNo chose that moment to drift through the wide double doors like some yellow cloud, her lacey parasol tucked under her arm while she peered at her nails, then buffed them on her shoulder. “Did I miss something?” she asked the bookshelves, craning her neck and seeming a little awed that there could be so many books gathered together, so many stupid paper pages. “Alarms are loud.”

“There you are!” Mauve Leibowitz jabbed her bone pipe toward the doors. “My other miscarriage. Get in here and sit with your sister where I can keep an eye on you. Sit down, now!”

NoNo appeared baffled, and looked at NiNi dozing on her perch. “On the credenza?” she asked her mother.

Lady Leibowitz covered her face with a palm and jabbed her pipe at the furniture where Bitzy and Purity sat, still as figures in a painting. “Sit your bottom on the sofa, Nonette. Sit it next to Elisabetta and do please try to be of some comfort to your bereaved friend. Pretend you’re an ambient banana tree, that ought to fall within your emotional range—and the dead gods know you’ve dressed the part.”

“Banana?” NoNo frowned. “This color is called canary, Mother.” But she did as Lady Mauve bade, and patted Bitzy as she sat. Bitzy didn’t look up, but chewed on her lip, lost in a little moment of empty concentration. NoNo dithered her parasol in her hand like an old man with a cane.

NiNi seemed to wake up, and lit a skinny brown cigarette from a paperweight lighter of scrimshawed horn that shared her tabletop; she puffed on it in what Purity supposed was intended to be a thoughtful manner. “It is canary, you know,” NiNi said to no one in particular, then resumed humming that sad syncopation that Purity found so irksome.

“Lady Leibowitz?” Purity attempted to be of some use. “There was a terrible amount of bloodshed in the aviary, have you heard?”

Mauve looked at Purity with a craggy blend of resignation and regret. “No. No, Purity Kloo, I have not heard. Please do enlighten me.”

Purity took a breath and described the scene as concisely as possible without including any incriminations—or any mention of Kaien the Murderer. “The alarum frightened me, and I thought—foolishly, I must admit—that the bird sanctuary might provide sanctuary for me as well. Instead I found a dozen dead praetors and as many dead servants.”

Lady Mauve narrowed her eyes. “Do you mean to tell me, Miss Kloo, that if I marched you straight to the aviary, we would find no fewer than two dozen corpses?”

Purity faltered. “Well, yes, ma’am. I’m not exaggerating the number of casualties, if that’s what you’re—”

“—I am not.”

“—And I certainly hope you won’t be marching me back to that horrid—”

“—I will not.”

“—Then, yes, ma’am, that’s the gist of it.”

“I see.” Lady Mauve bit her pipe, ruminating. “And did you by chance happen to make any other pertinent observations while waltzing through the hallways?”

“Well”—Purity bit back several salty rebuttals that sprang to mind— “I did, as a matter of fact. The guardsmen were scattered, as if they’d been cut down before they assumed battle formation, which as you might gather suggests that they were killed alarmingly quickly. Also, the servants lay atop the guards and came from the opposite entrance—that is, they were coming from the Petite Malaison, whereas the praetors seemed to have been dispatched from Dendrite’s Folly, where we sit now. This tells us, as I’m sure your ladyship will agree, that the Killer—or whomever is responsible, for there’s no direct evidence to link Lord Bratislaus’ passing to the person or persons responsible for the butchery in the aviary— dispatched the praetors and was subsequently surprised by the servants, who were then cut down.”

Lady Leibowitz regarded Purity with something resembling infuriated awe. “My, that is an impressive recounting, Purity, and I’m certain your father would be proud. Proud, if not surprised—judging by how the Baron rambles on in praise of his favorite daughter.”

Purity blushed. That backhand would be as close as Mauve Leibowitz could come to a compliment.

“But why, pray tell, would a dozen servants rush into a scene of such slaughter?”

“That’s just what we—what I wondered, Lady Leibowitz. I’m afraid I have no satisfactory answer to that question.”

“And you say you went to the aviary because you were frightened, do you?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“So frightened that you managed to assess the scene with more aplomb than many a professional investigator?”

Purity gritted her teeth and aimed for hauteur. “As you say, ma’am: would I be my father’s favorite without merit?”

Lady Leibowitz shook her head, appeased for the moment. “No, you would not. The Baron dotes overmuch, but he’s no fool. Very well. Thank you, Purity. I shall have a look at the scene in the aviary myself, before those praetors begin reviving and our evidence scurries off to the showers in shame.”

“In that case, I should like to find my father, Lady Leibowitz. He’ll need to be made aware of—”

“—I think not. You will all four of you head down the hall to Elisabetta’s apartments and you will stay there until I arrive to say otherwise. Am I clear?”

“Yes, Lady Leibowitz,” Bitzy and Purity said as one. NiNi slid off the credenza and ground her cigarette into an amber ashtray.

“Yes, Mother.” Something fierce glinted in NoNo’s eyes as the girls filed out of the library through the wide, tall doors. Before it disappeared behind a twirling sunshade, her chin made the faintest jab of defiance.

A tense but mercifully short march to Bitzy’s salon ensued. None of the girls seemed quite themselves, and the surly Leibowitz house guards in front of and behind them didn’t help the mood. Where are the praetors? Purity wondered.

“What are we to do?” Purity was beside herself with worry, dispossessed enough to forget to keep her concerns to herself. “Throw a fucking tea party while the Circle tears down the Dome around us?”

Bitzy grabbed both of Purity’s hands and shook them with cartoonish accord. “Oh, yes!” she exclaimed. “That’s a brilliant idea, Purity! Just what we need to distract ourselves from this awkward business. A tea party!” She seemed to have rewound time by an hour or so and unprocessed the news about her father, and Purity wondered if perhaps Bitzy wasn’t having a bit of a schism.

“You cannot be serious.” NoNo was having none of it, and for once Purity found herself allying with a Leibowitz.

“Really, Bitz, don’t you think you should be with your family at a time like this?”

Bitzy threw up her hands. “Drowned gods, no! The last thing Beauregret and Absynth will want is their little sister underfoot, and Mother . . . Mother will be . . .”

“. . . I’m sure your brothers are taking perfect care of Lady Bratislaus, Bitz.” Purity reached out to console her friend, whether she needed it or not. If Purity couldn’t be out there finding the Killer, she’d at least practice decency. The dead gods knew it was in short supply.