The Waking Engine (42 page)

His first look at Lallowë Thyu walking down the length of the atrium confirmed the image that everyone, primarily Asher and Tam, had painted in his mind: she looked like a Thai whore who owned half of everything and coveted the rest. Too much eye shadow, no smile lines, pearl earrings the only bright thing on the face. Her jodhpurs cut from a heather suede, riding jacket in Terenz-de-Guises red and black, hair up—the marchioness ripped off her gloves while barking at Tam.

Lallowë held a little golden disc in her hand, and spoke to it with a smile slit across her delicate face as she marched toward the banyan. “Of course she’s Dead, new sister, you don’t think I’d leave her be if she lived, do you? No, it doesn’t matter how it happened, why would that matter? What matters is that the slut is well and truly capital-D Dead, and as I was saying— boy, bring me wine,” she snapped at Tam, who fled back down the atrium. “As I was saying, the Lady’s last lunacy accomplished several of my goals, not the least of which was her removal as a trusted friend and advisor to our erstwhile—what’s this? Boy, I said wine, not swinepiss—you, other boy, get out of my chair.”

Here she snapped at Cooper, who did not jump at all.

She continued, seeming to ignore Cooper’s disobedience. “Besides which—good wine, imbecile, do I have to crush your man-grapes to drill the notion of a peppery dry white into your obdurate skull?— and more to the point, I’ve forced matters to a head, which I hope Mother will appreciate, just like I hope the boy isn’t bringing me the second reserve of that sour gewürztraminer he knows I loathe”—Tam and the offending bottle did an about-face—“and which ought to drum out whatever it is that the vivisistors are connecting to and causing the feedback loops I can’t get past. I won’t mention that I suspect that same stormy feedback system to be responsible for the—what was the word?—whatever sickness that’s suddenly driving people to act like the churls they’ve always truly been. Everyone knows it’s more than just the government that’s rotten in this city. Well, everyone who knows anything, which of course isn’t anyone at all.”

She folded her palm and the golden disc disappeared, then lifted a booted leg and punted Cooper off the chaise lounge with all the piston force of an angry bull. He spun twice in the air and landed in garden muck, too surprised to remember to breathe.

“Airy Dark,” Lallowë Thyu cursed, relaxing into her favorite chair with all the ease of a sunbather on holiday, “the children of men are stupid beasts.” She took a glass from Tam, sipped, bared her teeth in a tolerant smile, and with a tap of her ring against the rim of the glass, chimed her wine frosty. Tam set a second glass on a small table beside her. Cooper noticed all this with half his attention, pulling himself out of a trough planter that had moments before been riotous with geraniums. He gasped, regaining his breath.

“I hate geraniums,” the Marchioness added. “They’re a common, furry plant. And you’re a common, furry man—aren’t you, Cooper?”

Cooper brushed dirt and crushed leaves—they were furry, he admitted to himself—off the shirt Alouette had provided, and straightened his ridiculous sarong. The still-uncatalogued shaman’s senses he’d won with such difficulty pulsed inside his chest in warning. A high-pitched buzzing sound rang in his ear.

“You . . .” He struggled to regulate his breathing. “Are vile . . . trash, Lolly. And . . . that’s all your momma . . . can talk about in . . . the Court of Scars.”

Thyu dropped her jaw and something dark and cruel rolled out of her mouth, intending to whip his face with her prodigious serpent tongue— but Cooper, tipped off by his newly enhanced instincts, managed to raise his hand at the last picosecond and grab the dry black thing as it shot out from her mouth, twisting his wrist to catch Thyu’s tongue just before it struck his face. Her expression, he thought, was priceless.

“I’ve been whipped enough for one week.” He let go of the tongue and wiped his hand on his shirt.

Thyu held her hand against her jaw, wincing, as the ophidian tongue retracted into her mouth. After a moment she pursed her lips and nodded sharply.

“Come a long way in just a few days, have we? Already beating up ladies, are you? I see Asher’s rubbing off on you.”

“I don’t think anything with a six-foot tongue gets to call itself a lady, Lolly.”

“Ha!” The marchioness slapped her thigh. “Sexist and racist. He raped his sister, did you know that? She killed herself and the baby to escape him. Oh yes, ‘Asher’ is as famous a woman-beater as he is a ladykiller. He must be so proud of his meaty little protégé. Still, I’ll bet he hasn’t shown you his other face, has he? The one he was born with?” She leaned forward to study Cooper’s expression. “I didn’t think so. Poor Cooper, lost and abused and fed to all kinds of wolves.”

Thyu bent forward and slid the second wine glass toward him like a chess piece. She tapped it with her ring, and the glass chimed frosty in an instant.

“We’ve only just met, so forgive me if I offend you by saying so,” she purred, “but it seems to me that you might feel rather put out that I’ve been more forthcoming than your absent-hued friend?”

Cooper wished the buzzing in his ears would go away until he recognized how it scratched at the inside of his skull. “Riddle me this, princess: that a magic ring you’re wearing?”

“It’s just a ring. I’m magic.”

“You sure about that?” He smiled.

“Ape, I’m a faerie. Of course I’m magic.” It was a fine gold ring from her husband’s family hoard, and maybe a wedding present, but it was only jewelry.

Lallowë narrowed her eyes until they were razors.

“Well, you do know that I can hear fear, right?” Cooper sat down on his little stool and picked up his wine. “I can’t do much, but apparently hearing fear is a thing—and I can do it. I hear an eensy weensy worm dying inside your ring, Lollipop, and it is terrified.”

For the first time, Lallowë Thyu looked taken aback. For a moment Cooper saw a frightened, lonely woman where a lamia had been. Inside his head, where the magic happened, Cooper heard Lallowë’s truth: Mother, she thought, MotherMotherMother. Vivisistor, AreYouWatchingMe? Vivisistor?

Cooper smiled. “If she is watching, Lolly, how disappointed she must be.”

The marchioness jerked as if slapped.

“Are you all junked-out on vivisistors, too?”

Lallowë’s mouth formed a thin smile that promised cruelty commensurate with her embarrassment. “What commendable curiosity!” She clapped her hands rapidly in a frill of mock delight. “What an opportunity to begin the exchange of ideas and digits!”

Lallowë slid a jewelry box onto the table, a matte red metal bevel and lid, paned with silvered glass on two ends. Cooper didn’t need his fancy new superpowers to recognize that Lallowë Thyu specialized in nasty surprises. So many ways to lose yourself, here, and so many pieces to be lost.

“A vivisistor, my plump, healthy-looking guest, is not that different from a contraption called a ‘transistor,’ which I understand you should be familiar with, coming as it does from your world of origin.”

Cooper said nothing. In the center of the box, like nested junk, sat the golden disc to which Lallowë had been chatting—the bottom half of a pocket watch cupping a coin.

“A transistor, as I’m certain you know, receives a current of a power called electricity and amplifies it, producing a stronger emanation than it received. A vivisistor works along similar principles but incorporates the more versatile and propitious properties of the arcane. Which is how I can teach it to talk before I’ve completed it.” She paused. “Mother really hasn’t scratched the surface.”

Lallowë pointed inside the box. “It’s a true wonder to see an invention that incorporates ideas developed in separate realities—that usually fails quite spectacularly. But in this instance, the creators of the vivisistor have produced a device that generates and manipulates power. Power from life.”

“The worm in your ring.” He did not like where this was headed.

“You see”— she ignored him—“I have a problem of scale. You’re far too big for what I need, and yet I’ve thought of a way through which you can still be useful. Isn’t that a delight? I’m going to ask you to put your pinky finger inside this little red box, and you’re going to do it.”

“Fuck you.”

“The Ruby Naught here is quite a treasure. Among other, better things, the box has a keen ability to manipulate here and there. Which is how the box is going to separate your finger from your body, while keeping it alive. And you’re going to let it.”

“Fuck me,” Cooper breathed.

She lifted her shoulders in acknowledgement, as if he’d paid her a compliment, but awkwardly. “After, the stump where your pinky finger used to be will be capped with a metal that possesses transitive and entanglement properties, so that the detached finger will continue to receive blood from your body. It won’t actually be severed so much as simply separated.”

“You do know that all these props don’t distract from the fact that your mother doesn’t love you, right?”

“And then you’re going to finish your wine because it’s an exceptional vintage—not too dry, not too sweet, weighty on the tongue with just a hint of Anjou and black pepper and dusk cedar. Then you’re going to stand up and walk out of my mansion and never lay eyes on me again. Just so we’re clear.”

“I’m going to do exactly none of that, you overprivileged nut job.” He lifted his glass and toasted her; Thyu did have good taste in whites.

Lallowë shook her head. “Cooper, I admire your vim, but no matter what has happened to you since you arrived in my city, there is one truth that remains unaltered: you are quite beyond your depth.”

His hackles rose. “And you’re a oppressive cunt.”

If the marchioness felt insulted she gave no sign. “Oppression. You say the word like it’s a malignancy, when nothing in the world could be more natural—and in fact, oppression serves your interests far better than you seem to believe. Do you, perhaps, nurture some flawed yet abiding notion concerning the welfare of the people who live in the City Unspoken? Absence of any limiting, containing force in this city is precisely what’scaused the current chaos.”

As she spoke, Lallowë Thyu reached across the table and took his wrist with all the care of a palm-reader. Cooper found himself unable to move.

Lallowë saw the panic on his face. “I did tell you, I’m magic. But to continue . . .” she spoke casually. “You are, however, comically mistaken if you believe I have any interest in the mongrels of this city.” She opened one side of the box by sliding the glass panel up until it clicked into place. “Toward what absurd purpose would I direct them? I have little to no interest in anything or anyone you could possibly know, be aware of, or expect to encounter.” She folded Cooper’s frozen fingers into a fist, all but the pinky. “I will acquire your blood because something I want necessitates that I do so, and I will contrive to remove only your finger because it is efficient: you are not important, and I spare you your freedom because I don’t fancy commissioning a metal cage big enough for an entire man-pig.”

At that, the marchioness carefully slipped his little finger into the box, then flashed him a smile of such humble beauty it belonged on a magazine cover. The glass dropped. There was no pain. Cooper watched the glass panel slice neatly through his pinky, below the second knuckle. He felt a popping sensation and a spark of electricity, but nothing more.

From the faceless coin, a bead of mercury-like liquid metal condensed. It slid toward the severed fingertip and quickly capped the stump, pulling tight as a tourniquet and capping his finger like a bottle capped at a factory. Sliding beneath the glass pane of the box, the living metal dripped up the outside of the glass and performed a similar procedure upon what remained of his little finger. The metal flexed and sealed itself off, growing cool.

That was it. When Lallowë removed the box from the table, Cooper looked down and saw the hermetic cap that fit his wound—it annealed to his skin perfectly.

“I wasn’t kidding about your mother, Lolly.” Cooper decided a finger was a finger. “You’re nothing but a disappointment.”

“Try to wiggle your fingers,” she asked, lifting the box to her face. “I’ll permit that much movement, child.” Cooper was relieved to loosen the grip of his tightly fisted hand— and was surprised to see the fingertip inside the box wriggle. The marchioness was right, the finger was still connected to him through the metal cap, still alive and sending and receiving blood to and from his hand. He felt the tip of his finger touch the lid of the box, and shivered.

“Wow,” Cooper said, despite himself.

Lallowë condescended to grace him with another curt nod, like a bird pecking at raw meat, and laid his hand on the table, palm up, smoothing his fingers flat. “Now, you might think that a little death will restore your finger, but you’d be wrong. The Sixth Silver works like a body-binding, but is more specific. So long as I have your finger capped with my silver, you will wake from sleep or death with nine fingers. The tenth is mine.”

His jailer exhaled, relaxing into her chaise— she lifted her arms over her head, mussing her hair and sliding down the seat, her blouse tugging at the curves of her breasts. “Thank you, Cooper! I can’t tell you how long it’s been since I’ve dismembered someone who isn’t family.”

She paused. “I suppose as long as I’ve been trapped in this disposable hell of a city.”

“Then why stay?” Cooper asked. “Did someone bind you against your will too?”

“Yes,” Lallowë said with a glance at the gold ring on her finger that she’d insisted was ordinary. “She might as well have done just that.”

Bending to one side like a drawn longbow, the marchioness pulled back her arm for a punch and slammed her fist into lip of the nearest granite planter, sending up a cloud of rock dust. The planter shuddered from the force of punch and Lallowë shook gravel from her knuckles—as well as the remains of her ring. Beige mucus drooled from within the cracked casing. She eyed the goo and pursed her lips, wondering. In the distance, someone played a sad song on a flute.

Cooper cracked the joints in his neck, beginning to regain motility. The flute music reminded him of bare branches and weeping. “I’ve been inside her, you know. The Cicatrix. She’d rather have a plank of driftwood for an heir than you. When you hit bottom, Lollyparts, when you hit bottom . . . I’m going to be there.”