The Waking Engine (44 page)

Almondine padded toward her sister with a look of probational sympathy.

“I understand your animosity, Lolly, and always have. I kept quiet for years to give you a chance to prove yourself, and you did. But Mother . . . Mother changed the game, and I don’t honestly think that there can be any more competing for her favor. We are both just meat to her now; she sees all organics as incomplete.”

“Is that your way of declaring war, then?” Lallowë admired herself in the mirror, naked save for the little jacket, which obscured her breasts but did not hide them.

Almondine shook her head. “Not against you, Lolly. Stop choosing outfits and listen, please:

“While I slept, I dreamt of the one who stole my soul. It was not one of the First People, Lallowë. It was Mother.” Almondine cocked her head, eyes still as dead as dormice. “The fey are terrified of her. She forces mutilations upon them, steals the legs of little faerie girls, fills their bodies with vivisistors, which are connected to each other, all of them, irreversibly.”

Lallowë laughed to herself, wishing she had an army or a cold glass of wine standing between herself and her sister. “You may have dreamed all that, sister, but I lived it. I saw her take her lover, some favored champion of the Wild Hunt, and tear off his feet. Now he lopes through a wasteland on recurved tension blades and weeps with each step; his mutilations might even matter, if there were anything left to kill in her game reserves.” The vivisistors are networked?

Her sister nodded once; her eyes were glass.

“One other thing.” Almondine hesitated, deciding whether or not to continue. “I dreamt one other thing—I dreamt the memory of our sister. I dreamt she was close to you, Lolly.”

“Our sister?” Lallowë stopped cold, the hangers of slacks in her hands forgotten.

“Don’t you remember? When we were small there was a holiday, and our sister came to play. She thought she was dreaming, of course, but still she visited us in the way that human children so often do: accidentally, and in dreams or at twilight, dawn, some liminal hour. And Mother gave us dresses she’d had the spiderkin weave, and we played rabbit-rabbit- worg. You were the worg the whole time, chasing us all through the brush and howling like a mad thing. Then Mother gave us iced cakes and sweet wine and danced for us, I remember. She called us Almsy and Lolly and Sissy.”

Sissy. Lallowë narrowed her eyes and crossed her arms.

“I remember no such thing.” She was not pleased to hear talk of another sister—this morning she had been an only child, now she was bookended by bitches from the same litter. Shoved aside by her mother— again—and kept out of the loop entirely, it would seem. “I do not remember any Sissy.”

“Well, I do.” Almondine fingered some spare clockworks that Lallowë had left on a dresser. “She was a sharp little thing, angry like you but without your cruelty. Hair like sunrise, thanks to fey blood, but her hands were human, so she couldn’t stay—her blood ran to baseline human. You shouldn’t concern yourself with her, Lolly, she’s not a contender. Just a memory. We both need to keep our eyes on Mother; I don’t know what she intends but there is a chance it will . . . conflict . . . with . . .”

“With life as we know it?”

Almondine flashed a blade-thin smile that could have been Lallowë’s. “As you know it, maybe. I haven’t known life for some time.”

“Yet here you are, returned to take my place.” Lallowë took off her bolero, then put it back on, uncertain how she should react.

“Your place? Lolly, no.” Almondine leaned against a dresser and inspected her nails—they’d always been strong, sharp wood. Living wood.

“You honestly, truly expect me to believe that Mother didn’t revive you to supplant me?” Lallowë settled on a ruched wrap jacket with deep inner pockets, and with the discarded bolero in one hand she surreptitiously grabbed the red metal jewel box. The Ruby Naught had once belonged to her husband’s grandfather, but now it was hers, all hers. And it could do far more than sever fingers.

Almondine frowned. “I don’t know what Mother intends, honestly. She speaks in riddles these days, even when she means to be straightforward. She has compromised the integrity of her essential self, and I could no sooner follow her logic than I could follow her orders.”

“You expect me to believe that you’re here to disobey?” Lallowë scoffed. “Perfect little Almondine?”

“I am my mother’s daughter. I will never betray her, Lallowë, do not think that.” The elder sister put her palms together and cracked her knuckles. She spoke deliberately so that Lallowë could not willfully misunderstand. “I have always accepted as fact my succession. I will rule, I thought. Let you rant—there was no amount of success you could achieve that would displace me: by primacy and by blood, I am Mother’s heir. Only . . . I do not want to rule a broken empire. Do you?”

Lallowë lowered her eyes. “The Court of Scars could be restored, if Mother were to be removed.”

Almondine nodded. “Just so.”

“And it might be even worse, Almondine, than just ruling broken universes. You say you’ve seen what Mother did to our people—machine faeries coughing up engine oil.” Lallowë arched her back and felt her body, whole and young and flawless. “Have you ever considered what atrocities she would force upon her heir?”

“What else were you about with your vivisistor, if not atrocity?” Almondine asked. “Mother could have done as much to me as I slept, or she could have let you finish your treachery and make me into an abomination. But she did not, and for that she will forever have my gratitude. I cried in relief when I awoke down below, in your ossuary, Lolly. Not to be awake—what is life, and what is waking?—but to be whole.”

The Cicatrix unleashed the madness when she felt the chains wake, juddering to life after millennia of slumber. That was an interesting development—one her assays had assigned a likelihood of less than 5 percent—but would not significantly disrupt her own. She held no truck with the First People; the signs of Chesmarul’s interference weren’t hard to miss, certainly, but the queen hadn’t known to what extent the being’s interests would collide with her own—or if Chesmarul would make a play to help the mortals avoid the plague of deathless madness that would momentarily consume them.

Why Chesmarul would put the chains into play escaped the Cicatrix’s reasoning, but it changed little: operational or deactivate, that machine— that ancient, impossible engine—would yield up its secrets once she stormed the Dome and handed the city to her allies.

The First People were immortal, not omnipotent. Soon enough, they would share even their immortality. Freedom; scars like lacework crisscrossed her tongue, but the Cicatrix could still taste it.

So much effort spent looking for evidence of the svarning, only to discover that it had been growing within her all the while. It was the song she could not stop the vivisistors from singing to one another—the network she could not disable—and she’d fed it with her own life force. It was not at all unlike a child.

Perhaps the fourth would make her proud.

“Unspool, you childe of faerie.” She crooned to the svarning, opening up her systems to vent the madness into the space between worlds. “The ancients named you, but I give you life.”

It rushed out of her like bad blood, clotted and knotty, swarming the air. It gobbled up spare thoughts, demanding attention, a magical neurosis that never slept. Soon it would drown the metaverse for its mother— a gift she would humbly accept.

Asher stood at the crown of the caldera and surveyed the city he’d striven for so long to protect. The mountain that contained the Apostery offered the best view of the city: Caparisonside and the Lindenstrasse still slept quietly in the predawn light, except where plumes of smoke and dust rose from streets and intersections collapsed by the movement of the massive catenary chains as they returned to their ancient positions and began their intended function. Due west, the Guiselaine bustled as always, torches and gas lamps illuminating its maze of streets. Displacement Avenue shot northeast out from the Guiselaine like a needle of light, more alive at night than during the day.

To the northwest the false elements of Bonseki-sai boiled in eternal struggle and balance, or at least they seemed to. North of that, Godsmiths slumbered as well as it ever did, which was fitfully at best. To the far north, towers burnt beneath a swarm of black clouds. Even in the predawn light, Asher could see that the clouds that hovered over the abandoned towers now stretched a finger of black turbulence south, toward the Dome. The liches and their black dogs marched to war.

The Apostery’s caldera offered more than a view: if the chains were moving, then all eyes would be on the Dome— aboveground. That was a spectacle that would captivate and terrify, and even the praetors would be too panicked to think of posting a rear guard. While the Undertow fought their madman’s battle, Asher would sneak inside unseen.

That wasn’t all. He’d stood here twice before, so long ago that the precincts of that city had been erased and rebuilt, and erased and rebuilt again. History was a palimpsest that would not remember your name, nor recall why it mattered. Or so Asher hoped: he could not remember his father’s name, but he remembered coming to the lip of this pit, a hundred thousand years ago or more, as a child. His father had been blinding, and when the world-beast blessed his reign, Asher had not known he could feel such pride. When the time came for Asher to stand in his father’s place, well, by then things had grown darker. The world-beast’s blessing had not felt so generous, then.

Despite the incense smoke that rolled out of the Apostery, Asher could smell the life in his city—the polyps that punctuated his rib cage pulsed in time to the heartbeat of the city, maddening lately but more alive than ever, since he’d sang the Lady to her peace. He’d had to flex organs he hadn’t used in years to keep the spears of light from stabbing through his leathers and refixing his face. Sesstri would beat him senseless when she saw the truth.

He smiled, feeling the ache that always arose when he thought of Sesstri but could not reach out a hand to feel her body, slender and firm, smelling always of parchment and leather.

The Dome pulsed with urgency: the Dome, always the Dome. He avoided looking at it whenever he could, but now he had no choice. A spherical mountaintop larger by orders of magnitude than any other structural or topographical curiosity within the sprawling necropolis, the Dome glowed gold and green from within— a combination of the false sunlight illuminating the wooded glades within, the riotous vegetation itself, cloaking the buildings within from sight, and the thick tempered glass held in place by whorls and webs of metal.

If the telltale seismic activity originated where Asher supposed it did, the unchanging monument would soon look differently: by the time the sun crested the horizon, the Dome would open like a five-petaled flower. He could feel the chains moving underneath the city, winding tight around ancient drums—from the Guiselaine, from the Lindenstrasse, Caparisonside, and Godsmiths, from the wasteland in the north where the Undertow hid amidst the bristling towers that no one living recalled was once called the Argent Theft.

He could delay the moment no longer. Time to jump. Time to irradiate. Swallowing the pain of five years of self-exile, Asher spread his arms and leapt from the crown of the caldera; the smoke- stained scent of a thousand false faiths whipped past his head as he dropped like a stone through the cylindrical shaft. He aimed for a spot far below: the metal plate at the center of the Apostery courtyard. These days it was worn smooth, but once it had borne his father’s crest.

His forebears had uncrowned themselves here, dashing their bodies on the floor far below. He’d last seen his father like this, rushing to greet his fate, painting the seal with white blood—singing the final song of his Death, and clearing the way for his heir. If the chains did not work as they ought, Asher would share a similar fate, pulped beyond recognition, leaving the city leaderless.

He thought pulp might indeed be his immediate future, until the entire courtyard shuddered and rock dust blasted out from beneath the plate as he raced toward it; a fraction of a second before Asher would have crashed into the metal slab, it began to drop. As the plate accelerated downward like a dumbwaiter cut loose from its counterweight, Asher caught up to it and met its surface—touching down with his feet and one gray hand, a feather-soft landing. He smiled without warmth; a real prince would not try to survive. A real prince would abdicate and disappear.

The second half of the ride happened just as quickly as the first: mirroring the vertical shaft that rose above the now-gaping hole in the center of the Apostery courtyard, so did a similar, deeper pit drop away beneath it; the metal crest descended steadily, guided by the catenary chain that must still be attached to its underside, and through this aboriginal bore Asher rode the ancient elevator to the bottom of the city he’d ruled and strangled and ruined, resigned at last to go home.

Cooper was thrilled to hear Lolly’s screams, though judging by the ashen look on Tam’s face, the domo did not share Cooper’s enthusiasm; the foxfaced young man kept tugging at his vest as if a tidy outfit might protect him from the worst of the fallout. It likely won’t, poor guy.

Tam had hurried Cooper into a high, long hallway, a groin-vaulted ceiling looking down upon a carpet runner the color of red velvet cake, its deep pile resting atop a blocky parquet that vanished in both directions, the whitewashed walls covered with a small infinity of tapestry. A nearby credenza overflowed with the same white flowers that had enshrined Lallowë during his amputation in the greenhouse, but these were severed at the stems and their petals no longer breathed.

“Oh come on.” Cooper nudged Tam. “Did you forget how to smile?” Tam gave Cooper a strange look. “I remember smiling, Cooper, I just don’t remember why we did it. These days . . .” He trailed off, and for just a moment, Tam looked like his head felt too crowded with anxieties, as if he wanted to bash his brains out against the doorjamb.