The Waking Engine (35 page)

The Cicatrix jerked as several vivisistors shorted out, their tiny occupants screaming through muted inputs, unheard but felt. There, beneath her shoulder blade, and another beneath her clavicle. She rolled her shoulder and jutted her collarbone, lifting her elbows and turning her wrists in a strange dance. She exhaled, feeling a kind of ecstasy as the latest packet from beyond the Seven Silvers pinged her systems. Again the vivisistors sparked, above her pelvis and a chorus along her spine, and the queen swayed along, full of grace and lightning. All her silver bells were ringing, and they rang like thunder.

The unknown vivisistor beneath the City Unspoken called to her, huge and ancient and hungry. It sucked out her life while it spooled her systems with a sick signal that tasted like all the madness in the metaverse.

The Cicatrix felt her life bleed out into the space between worlds, an invisible hemorrhage she could do nothing to stop. The vivisistors were a part of her, as much as her scars and bones, and they powered themselves. Her life should have been outside the equation— she was no battery, she was not trapped, dying, inside a machine. A machine that gathered madness in exchange for her essence. And still, she bled.

The song that distant vivisistor sang to her sounded broken, like the tune of a music box whose pins had rusted away. It sounded sickly, too.

She’d stuffed vivisistors into her subjects, forced them upon servants and manipulated trends until her courtiers felt compelled to follow suit. Some had required convincing. She sought to staunch the flow by feeding other lives to the vampiric feedback, to give herself time to diagnose the problem, patch her firmware, or build a better firewall. Nothing. The more faeries she packed with vivisistors, the more hungrily the vacuum drank her essence and filled her up with madness.

And the more incessantly the unknown vivisistor pulsed like an emerald and lilac star, its colors and music strobing through the impossible network. All told, it was not an unlovely way to bleed.

When she allowed herself to sleep, the Cicatrix dreamed of birds and of men, staggering through trees to evaporate. They seemed so much like Lolly’s little clockwork toys, ticking down to their final movement. She woke wanting to Die.

Her concierge subroutine pinged her HUD with an alert: the time had come to summon her court to session. An important arrival waited in the wings.

The title Weapon of Choice scrolled across her vision. Her heads-up display constantly streamed information, but the concierge subsystem only gave titles to significant events. She had never programmed it to do so—perhaps the habit was idiosyncratic to one of the pixies that powered its vivisistors. Perhaps they collaborated, to soothe or console her. The lilac and emerald pixels flickered like fireflies before they winked out:

Event_Title: ‘Weapon_of_Choice’ Sense6th::Inverse lifesign detected. Hardware Failure flagged and logged.

There was no hardware failure—her sensors couldn’t interpret the truth about the guest who arrived, and logged it as a failure, but the Cicatrix considered the coming parley a great success even before it began. A first, in all of fey history. Oh yes, she’d been anticipating this meeting for days. She was curious to see how her court would react, those who remained. How they’d obey.

The Cicatrix lifted her torso fully upright, rearing back upon a coil of black carbon, a queen cobra commanding her nest. She tasted the air with her tongue, and wondered at the limitations of the natural world. She did not notice any diminished connection to her landscape, now that she’d diminished it, and the many pleasant skies of her empire were quarantined from her working memory, replaced by the single sky she’d built here, above her court: brown to match the earth, barren to suit the trees. No blue sky, no warmth on her skin as she danced.

No dancing.

Once, she could not have tolerated the presence of the undead. “Come, come, you dukes of thorn and claw!” the Cicatrix howled, the voice box in her throat-meat amplifying her call until the denuded forest rang with feedback.

“Come, Lady Ash and Lord Frost! Come, wild hunters and miscarriages of the airy dark! I call the Court of Scars to audience. Who dares ignore my summons?”

The forest shivered, and a few thin birds shot from the trees and escaped to the west. Where was the wild circus? Where were the revelers and murderers, the half-breeds and beast-folk, the haughty pure and their thralls?

Gon€ to find the bl00d and mu$i¢, our queen. Fled alonggg teh hedgerow, fled alonggg teh countless branching paths.

“Come, you brave souls.” The Cicatrix ignored her outsourced insight and growled to those who lingered. “Attend me.”

A mat of leaves between a forked branch blinked and slunk forward. Its skin shimmered from bark to thundercloud to mud as it passed, before resolving into thousands of articulated, tiny mirrors. They covered Oona like skin, in place of the skin that had been flensed away.

“We hear,” Oona whispered, her voice rough like grinding glass. “We come.”

Old Piezeblossom hobbled forward, wreathed in dark graphene petals that bristled from his cheek to his toe. His other leg had been adapted into a grounding spike, which he wrenched from the muck with every step. He had embraced amendment with a fervor that belied his age— Piezeblossom, too, must hear the call of freedom.

“The dukes are gone,” he croaked. “Lady Ash is fled. Lord Frost is dead. The hunters hunt. The Court of Scars assembles, such as we are.”

Oona tugged a rope she held in her chameleon hand, and a line of nameless faeries—children, mostly—marched out of the wood. Their hair was matted, their faces dirty, and their ankles shackled by cold iron. Such good subjects. Most had amendments of the lowest order—older coke-boiler systems, rusted or clogged or otherwise useless.

Among the trees, long fingers curled around branches like the bars of a jail cell, and huge eyes blinked, watching with held breath.

The Cicatrix smiled, and the gallery of fey whimpered in fear.

Piezeblossom coughed pus into the mud. “A guest, my queen.” He pivoted on his spike and bowed as best he could—his ears were fleabitten and moldy along their tips, she saw. “Skylord Rousseau, my queen.”

“Come, lich.” She’d made the thing wait two whole days—a decision that had proved more traumatic for the remainder of her court than anything; the lich seemed not to notice the passage of time.

Ambassador Rousseau slid forward on a curtain of shadowed air, just barely brushing her toe bones against the mud. It was a blasphemy she was denied in the City Unspoken and its annexed worlds, where no undead could set foot.

The gathered faeries did their best to keep still. The children began to sniffle and were hauled away by an iridescent Oona. A few others gasped and hid behind bare branches. Only Piezeblossom retained his composure. “Cherie, ssssweet friend!” exclaimed a skeleton of iron and silver, polished to shine along the cheeks and fingers and arm-bones, ribs etched with filigree; the hollow absence where her organs should be was shadowed like a church nave, and the bowl of her pelvis was filled with dried flowers, hyssop, and calamus.

H0w QQuaint.

She wore a russet wig for the occasion, long over one shoulder, silver jewelry to match her bones, and an open robe that disappeared into the shadows holding her aloft— and holding her bones together. An awful green fire burned in the sockets of her eyes.

“Once your presence would have enraged me at my very core. The constitution of a creature of the natural world is inimical to your, ah, manner of persistence. A faerie, in parley with the undead?” The Cicatrix held her black nails up to the sky—they were still translucent, at least. “This reception is a first, Ambassador, in all the worlds.”

The ambassador nodded her skull. “I am honored to be the firssst of my ilk to ssset foot on your sssweet ssssoil, my queen. Truly, I mussst be in a ssstate of grazzze, to walk again among sssuch wondrouzzz gardenzzz.”

“Do you miss it?” the Cicatrix asked. “Life?”

Ambassador Rousseau held up her hand. Between the polish, wrist bones were pitted like old iron and mottled with rust, held together with sick shadows. She sang a few meters of an old springtime hymn—the Cicatrix recognized it as simple human garden magic. The lich must remember the cantrip from life, as it was a weak thing, of childhood and nursemaids. But the song sounded as sweet as if its singer had possessed lips or a tongue: a butterfly disguised as a red leaf stirred upon the ground, struggled up from the mud, and fluttered toward the lich.

“Miss life?” Rousseau smiled, sort of; flakes of leather stapled to her skull twitched up, but it felt like a smile. The autumn- leafed lovewing alighted upon her fingertip, blinked its wings once, long and slow, and turned to ash as it died.

“Of courssse not.”

The ash retained its form. Wings flapped weakly, and an inversion of a butterfly took flight, a spidery thing that circled Rousseau’s wrist before crawling into her sleeve.

“Chains have little to offer a woman who holds the key. Life offers me nothing I cannot sssteal.” The ambassador held a hand to her wig, stroking a curl of dark hair against the memory of her neck.

The Cicatrix made a sound that was halfway between a hiss and a moan. “I share your dedication to radical freedom, Ambassador Rousseau.”

If the ambassador heard—or cared—it did not show. The Cicatrix found herself wondering what kind of woman this Rousseau had been when she lived. When those iron bones were cloaked in soft flesh.

“The svarning? Madnesss ssstalks the worldz, we are told. We hear it, like dissstant music, growing louder, but not yet drowning out the notesss of life and death. The Dome is sssealed, the Dying are numberlesss and find no ssssurceassse, and yet we wonder—does the cataclysm we’ve been promisssed approach, or will the svarning prove to be merely another disappointment?”

The Cicatrix shifted the length of her abdomen, coils shuffling. Something inside her carapace began to sing. “The madness comes, skylord. When you attack, the city will be at your mercy.”

“Where is it, then? Thisss disease that will cure the worlds of the tyranny of life and dead?”

Inside the queen’s chest, a second- string vivisistor shorted out. The sprite inside seized violently, and before her root process muted the offending mechanism, the Cicatrix heard it scream the word HERE.

“The Dome’s martial forces are veteran infantry with classsical tactical eleganssse.” Rousseau withdrew her Bakelite wand and twisted a cigarette into its end. She put the mouthpiece to her teeth and inhaled; the cigarette flared into what would have been life, had it not been life’s opposite. “We have enlisssted a famed former monarch to lead our living hossst, and her battlefield experience will prove decisive: none of ours need survive, of course. Our pawns will drown the Dome in sssuicide, while we decapitate the government. Or perhapsss we’ll drink it dry.”

“You will have my help in that regard, as promised.”

Rousseau shrugged. “How can you asssure usss that the Dome will be reopened, and that government will not rise up againssst usss?”

“I can assure you victory under any circumstances. I presume that to be sufficient.”

“Please expound.”

“No.” The Cicatrix loosed her coils and relaxed backward into her nest. These revenants intrigued her, but they would learn their place among her tool set. “Do we have an agreement?”

Ambassador Rousseau remained still, then ground her cigarette into her iron palm. “We do.”

The Cicatrix smiled with what remained of her true face, then, retracting the veil of third silver that covered her jaw. She thought she saw the green coals that were the ambassador’s eyes widen. The queen’s voice box chuckled as she slid the silver lips back into place, half-extending her visor so that it shaded her eyes. She tilted her head back like a sunbathing maiden, though her shoulder servos worked with the gyroscopics within her massive helm to maintain the upright posture of the helm and shoulder armor itself.

“That is all.” A flick of her nails, volcanic glass from a gauntleted fist. “Go.”

The blades angling out from her spine flexed, piezoelectric arcs flying between them. They were heat sink, capacitor, and auxiliary power source in one—and rather terrifying to behold.

The thing that thought itself her equal spun on an oxidized toe and glided away, burning a line into the mud. Already the Cicatrix had summoned tables and charts to her vison, flicking them around her HUD with eye movements and a habit of thought so engrained it was practically an automated subroutine of its own.

Yes. It was time to choose her weapon. She pulled a horn flute from within her carapace and contemplated the instrument. A good instrument could play any type of music—it could inspire dancers or make warriors weep. But add another voice to the song, and suddenly both instruments must play off and around each other. A symphony? Chaos given purpose.

All her plans spun on their own, and soon they would collide. She would conduct the chaos, channel it to her own purpose. That is what Unseelie faeries did. That was the work of a queen. That was why she’d spared her only viable child.

It was time to play the music, and wake her.

Sisterhood, mused Lallowë Thyu as she fiddled with the confabulation of engineering and inference, postulation and guesswork that comprised the reconstituted vivisistor, was a vexing condition. Take her wary orbit around Almondine as a case study: full-blooded and firstborn, endowed with rapine cruelty and rapier intellect, perfect in form and function alike, Almondine should by all measures have been the Cicatrix’s favored spawn. Yet the petite creature had lived for centuries as an outlier in her mother’s court, disdaining the Wild Hunt and following at nearly all times the path of least resis tance. The Court of Scars could be a blissful place, especially for an heir who could have—in theory, at least—pleased her royal mother with a minimum of effort.

When Hinto Thyu flickered through the worlds of the Seven Silvers and captured, for the briefest of moments, the attention of a younger Cicatrix— this was before her rechristening, before her amendments became deformity—no one had expected the child born from his passing patronage to amount to much. By rights, Lallowë should have been the outlier, scrounging an existence like the other mongrels, half-breeds, and hangers-on to the Court of Scars. And yet she had quickly become the exalted daughter, reaping the advantages of her mother’s esteem while Almondine faded into the background radiation, seemingly at peace with the cagey détente she’d assumed regarding her younger half- sibling—it was an arrangement with which Lallowë had never felt entirely comfortable; she did not understand why her sister allowed Lallowë to be the beneficiary of their mother’s attentions, why she hid the resentment she must have felt, or why she did not murder the half-breed whelp who’d stolen Almondine’s favor.