The Waking Engine (40 page)

Then, as Cooper continued to stare straight ahead, the wound became a ribbon again, the dripping lines of blood just threads of satin that pulled themselves back together.

“I see a red ribbon tied around your throat, but sometimes I see that your throat’s been slit wide open . . .”

Alouette nodded.

“It’s because you’re not you, you’re her. Chesmarul. That’s why your namesigns shift, isn’t it? Because you’re more than we are, and one sign can’t signify all of your . . . youness. Isn’t it?”

The boughs of the cathedral rustled like church-whispers in a breeze that ran its fingers through Alouette’s red curls as she looked away. When the breeze grew stronger, the leaves and branches spoke as her voice.

“No.” The word came from everywhere at once, quietly but omnidirectional. The sound vibrated through his body as much as his mind.

“Well, kind of.” Cooper’s eyes and bones buzzed with her, and it almost panicked him.

There was a pause. Then, “Yeah. I hate that name.”

Cooper turned back to the trees and shrugged. What was Alouette, and what was she really after? Was this the plan, then? Find as feckless a soul as possible and tease him into usefulness? That seemed a dumb idea, but who was Cooper to second- guess the vasty-big mind of a thing that could pass for a god?

Cooper saw golden cathedral-forest and knew it was only a representation of something his limited mortal mind couldn’t grasp. Why his friends’ souls ran in lines as pixel sprites along the bark of her cathedralmind.

“I get it now, what makes a shaman different than a magician or a goddess or a priest or a mad scientist,” he said to Alouette, who was the thing called Chesmarul when she wasn’t wearing flesh. “All it means is seeing life and death and the spirits in between, including yourself, in a certain way. Seeing sideways. And I’ve been looking at death and talking to spirits since I got here, haven’t I, Chesmarul?”

“My mother gave me that name. I don’t like to use it.” She spoke in her body’s voice—Alouette’s voice, which was Chesmarul’s voice. She was one of the First People, and she wore names as he wore socks.

“The First were polyglot,” she said, and the boughs stirred with her words. “No two alike, until we willed it. Most of the First People preferred to stand alone, our egos are too big to fit into a single reality—how could we come together and form a society, the way your people do? The Third are so adaptable: humans live and die together, faeries band into tribes, elementals stalk their planes in perfect stony accord. But we began before we knew the need to remember our beginning, and by the time we realized how precious our stories were, it was too late to recall with any clarity the story of our origin.”

“You were born before time was a thing, got it.” Cooper ignored Alouette and addressed the pool of red within her eye. “But what does it have to do with me, the city, and your Dying problem?”

“We pierced the worlds and created Death for ourselves.” The wind nodded into his neck, though Alouette stood limply, the eye of herself unblinking. “We lacked a beginning, but we had the means to write our own end. It is why you will find so few of us left, and why those you can find are so enraptured by the legends of their own making. We can appear very vain, and are rarely as far from stupidity as we’d have you believe. It’s also why an enterprising minority of the First People began to settle down, like the aesr did, to form the first communities. The aesr and those like them—and there have been many like them, on worlds stranger and more distant than this one—sought a continuity that extended beyond their own selves, and in doing so presaged the form the Third People would take. Individuality and collectivity combined in the alembic of culture, mixed in different proportions and with varying degrees of success. . . .”

Cooper nodded his head. “You’ve got a problem with living, dying, obviously. You can’t even talk about the Second People. You need a fresh perspective, maybe.” The red spilled out from her eye like a gunshot and resolved into a ribbon; it ran straight out from her face, parallel to the ground, heading for the tree line. “Maybe you need someone with a shaman’s knack for seeing the sideways truths that emerge from observing the way the world is. Like the truth of a bloodslut who’s desperate not to be a bloodslut anymore, who just wants death to stick. Or the truth that the Undertow have been holding an aesr hostage for years and feeding off her. Or the truth that Death is broken and we’re all super-duper mega-screwed.”

The line of red color wound away from Cooper and the stock-still body of Alouette, weaving itself around the pillar-trees according to some pattern only it could see. It darted back and forth until the cathedral was bannered with red, moving toward him until it stopped abruptly in front of his face. Redness hovered in the air like the brightest berry bursting, and the bloom of pigment resolved into a sketch of Chesmarul’s face, an outline that resembled Alouette’s physical features: cloudshaped bursts of color for hair, red dashes for eyebrows, the curve of her cheek and chin and neck hanging in midair. Cooper could see the cathedral-trees through the space where her skin should have been. To the side, her physical body drooped like a marionette doll.

“I’m not done. There’s something else, isn’t there? Something your average shaman might not understand. What is it? Why won’t you tell me?”

More of her face emerged from the ribbon of red, like the head of a red silk snake. Kind eyes, but her bow mouth was set in a line. Cooper saw resignation and distaste and compassion.

“Neat trick. I’m not asleep this time, I know that. I’m there and here. I’m standing in a cave alone and standing here in the cathedral-forest with the outline of your face and your empty body. So there’s that. But I am wide awake.”

The sliver of the thing called Chesmarul that Cooper could perceive with his mind nodded. “True statement.” Then it pushed him down, and he fell through the golden ground into a shadow bigger than the sun. Below, he felt the city rushing up to meet him.

Purity hefted the hammer. She wrapped both hands around its cord- wound handle and felt its weight. Colors from the Dawn Stains painted her face with a woad of light. She stepped closer to the nearest glass panel and raised the heavy instrument over her head. Then she froze. “What are you waiting for?” NoNo asked, rattling her sword in its parasol sheath.

Purity didn’t rightly know how to answer that question, even to herself, but something held her back. Kaien and NoNo had both had ample opportunity to destroy the Dawn Stains before, and both had failed to do so. What made Purity the one everyone turned to for cultural terrorism?

Oh my dead gods what am I doing? Purity went into a kind of seizure of awareness, straining every muscle in her body but not moving a hair. This is the closest thing we have to real holiness, don’t you see that? The Dawn Stains are our saints, our relics, our, our—heritage—you can’t expect me to destroy history. . . .

Gravity sang a different song to her arms and the hammer trembling over her head.

But that was just it, wasn’t it? Gravity. The gravity of history, the gravity of the rules that bound them: Kaien’s instructions from his father rested the future of the guilds and possibly the entire city upon his broad shoulders; NoNo’s deranged crimes originated with a blind instinct to protect her own; and had Prince Fflaen stood here himself, Purity was sure he would enumerate the reasons why the Weapon could not be allowed to fall into the mouth of even a single errant songbird.

So the deed and its gravity fell to Purity. She wouldn’t shrink from it— she did agree with them all, though she doubted her own motives as much as anyone else’s. She’d been ready to destroy the Dawn Stains out of nothing more than frustration, pure and simple. But this time she had come prepared— and she would use the rules to break the game. She would leverage history for a different future.

NoNo made an squawking noise. “I asked you a question, wench.” She rubbed her nose.

Purity looked her friend in the eye and flexed her stiffening joints. She brought the hammer down and the room exploded with a color spray.

One of seven stains shattered like a wave of gemstones: garnet, rose quartz, topaz, peridot. Petal, too, and bone and midnight, hanging in the air as the hammer slipped from Purity’s grip. The fall took forever; she fell to her knees just as slowly, crashing down with the glass.

She had to stand up and smash the other panes, but Purity took her time, picking glass from her bleeding knees while studying the song encoded on the bottom of each pane. She kept darting her eyes toward the musical notation, committing the pattern to memory. Such a good memory for facts and dates and pages she’d read only once, and such a poor memory for names and faces. Purity blasphemed and prayed that her mind would not fail her.

NoNo had flinched, but now she nodded toward the other stains, and Purity didn’t object. She hefted the hammer and obliterated another ancient glass window. And another, and another, all the while studying the pattern at the bottom bevel of each pane, and the Weapon hidden there. When she came to the last, a wafer of ancient glass suspended from wire and steel, Purity hesitated. A woman with red drops on her side placed an ugly black crown on her own head. This Stain was the oldest, its picture the most ruined, and age had transformed the crown into a mad thing that ate the head of the woman king.

With a stab of guilt, Purity tore her gaze from the figure in the glass and took a final glance at the blurred bars of black and gold underneath, searing the image onto her brain like a brand. Then she swung the hammer up, underhand, and watched the spray fly across the room. A lesson from eternity, shattered.

“There’s a good girl. You’ve lived up to your name today, lass.”

Lass? Purity dropped the wretched hammer and marveled at NoNo, a fraction of a powerful personality. She keeps on quoting pirates, because it’s all she knows.

“You, boy.” NoNo poked Kaien with her sword, cutting through his arm like butter. He cried out and she giggled. “Run.”

“I’m afraid I can’t do that, Miss Leibowitz.”

“Do you want to die, or Die? Run or choose, boy.”

“Kaien.” Purity nodded. “Please go. Please.” She didn’t know what would happen if he stayed.

Go, Purity mouthed. Kaien pulled himself up the spiral staircase warily, though she knew he wouldn’t go very far. Let NoNo have her laugh, Purity had something far more exciting, something she’d been starved of for far too long: leverage.

Purity stepped her way across the shards of half a million years, toward the stairs. NoNo Leibowitz watched her bloodied friend approach with glee. And the ghost of a macaw on her shoulder. Suddenly a champagne cork of hysterical, inappropriate giggles exploded somewhere inside Purity, and she blinked hard through tears not to laugh out loud.

So she sang instead. She felt her voice echo off the billionstone walls around her—the air still rang with the force of her blows. Purity could wield the song as the Weapon; it hung in the air, a shattered bell- song reverberating with released and dissipating power—at least, she hoped it was dissipating, or she’d have committed treasonous vandalism for naught.

As she sang, Purity closed her eyes and visualized the black and gold bars, hovering in her short-term memory. Then she relaxed into her breeding. If she had been raised for anything it was this: light music at a luncheon, a turn at the pianoforte, or a song to accompany a harpist at a pre- engagement luncheon preparatory party. It’s just that today’s excursion was Deadly. Purity was no songbird and had only NiNi’s annoying humming as reference for the notation on the Dawn Stains, but she managed with the pitchy determination of a daughter of privilege. The warble threading out of her throat grew into a melody, and NoNo’s eyes grew wide.

“Don’t! Purity, we’re on the same siiiii . . .”

The Weapon worked. Even as NoNo protested, her voice thickened like honey and her hands waved less wildly, an incredibly intricate clockwork toy grinding to a Dead stop. NoNo’s face froze in paralyzed panic, and Purity couldn’t turn away from the sight—as with the hammer and the Dawn Stains, she felt compelled to finish her work.

The song was not long, but it ended where it began, looping neatly— so Purity sang it again, then again, marching the key through the sequence of an arpeggio almost automatically. So much for music lessons being worthless, she thought as NoNo’s Dying body began to lose color, then opacity. Purity kept singing, flinging out high, sharp notes at NoNo like daggers.

I hate you. Purity poured her soul into the song, remembering NoNo’s promise to destroy Baron Kloo next. We were bad enough before this, cutting up girls for fashion infractions. Now we’re all monsters. Now I’m a Murderer, too. NoNo said she’d wanted to keep her mother’s hands clean, but she’d fouled them all instead.

NoNo’s eyes disappeared completely, then the rest of her. She simply evaporated, the ghost of her body boiled away. Purity stopped singing mid-tune, dumbfounded by the sudden finality of the act—like a clock breaking. She stood alone amidst the ruins of the Dawn Stains, white stone walls glowing softly on her Murdering face.

Life is a regrettable affair. It demoralizes and defeats me and I wish it never to end.

—Winston Churchill,
Jenny In Space