The Waking Engine (45 page)

Cooper eyed the domo warily. Tam’s namesign spoiled like bad fruit before Cooper’s eyes—the bowl-shaped stringed instrument went from gold to brown, and the note above it disappeared entirely. Then, as if a cloud blocking the sun passed and let light flood back down onto the world, Tam’s namesign restored itself, and Tam was shaking his head as if to clear it. “I’m sorry. What just happened?”

Cooper looked cagey. “Eh, Tam, I’m not so sure I should tell you. You’re kind of the enemy, you know.”

Tam tossed his head and scrubbed his fingers through his hair, which fell to one side like a roan mane. “A single night beneath the faerie mound . . .” Tam said to the ceiling, noticing the cobwebs among the molding. He’d have to get out a stepladder. “I know what I am.” He squared his shoulders and seemed to have made a decision. “Let’s get you out of here, while we can.”

Cooper thought to apologize for calling Tam the enemy, but just then the whole mansion shook, its floors and walls vibrating angrily—and he felt something pass underground with the force of a subway train.

“What, now we have earthquakes?” he asked, but in his head he saw a spiderweb beneath the city, only the web was made of metal chains as thick as house. He saw a dragon made of black plastics with the face of a faerie. He saw the Dome at the center of the spiderweb, waiting.

“Titania’s tits, how should I know?” Tam grumbled, and hurried Cooper to a heavy door at the end of a service corridor. Tam opened the door onto a short landing beside one of the Guiselaine’s many canals, and there they found a surprise: little Nixon stood in the doorway with his hands on his hips and an impatient expression.

“We don’t give alms,” Tam said brusquely. “There’s a baker off Velocipede Way who sometimes takes in street children, if you’re willing to knead dough for your supper.” He made to slam the door.

Cooper caught the door midswing. Nixon nodded gravely and held out his little hand. “Time to run, turd. Me and the pink broad are cooling our heels on a riverboat, but I think you better hurry.” Another tremor shook the house.

Cooper looked toward Tam imploringly. “The ground is heaving. Your lady’s sister is back from the wooden. I’ve been severed and body-bound. The Dying can’t Die and there’s a . . . there’s a place I need to be.” Cooper paused, wincing at what he said next. “I’m such a dork. I’m such a waste . . . I know you from the stories, Young Tam Lin—do you even know you’re in stories? If I don’t go now, there won’t be any more stories, ever.” Tam pursed his lips and pointed to a rickety ladder leaning against the manse wall that could be tipped over the canal and used as a footbridge. The quay beyond forked off into an alleyway that disappeared into the Guiselaine, and would be the quickest route to flee.

“Thank you.” Cooper stepped out into the morning light and looked back at the domo, with his fox-red hair and his green suit with the silk vest and neatly knotted tie—Tam’s hands were shaking on the doorframe, and he looked behind him into the house. He pulled a wistful face and shook his head. “Just leave while you can, Cooper.” Then he closed the door, its lock snapping into place and obviating further discussion. “Let’s go,” Cooper said to Nixon, lowering the poorly made ladder so that it bridged the canal. Nixon skipped across and waited for Cooper with a crooked smirk.

The alleys of the Guiselaine weren’t busy, but the few people they passed wore expressions that were tight around the eyes and full of agita. A busker stood against a blond stone wall, drenched in morning light and looking at his guitar like it was filled with snakes. A flower girl carried her basket under one arm and smiled at them, but her flowers were dry and brown—she seemed too busy coughing up dark, wriggling things to notice. Two men who looked like brothers stood on opposite sides of a three- foot wok simmering with fragrant, popping oil; they fried flatbread and rolled it around fresh cut coldcumbre and onion, but never took their eyes from the boiling oil. Nixon swiped a pair of rolls as he walked by, but the brothers only stared at the oil, mesmerized.

“Is Sesstri really waiting for us on a boat?” Cooper asked, taking the roll that Nixon proffered and scarfing it down. Nixon nodded, his mouth full of fried bread and vegetables.

Nixon swallowed and wiped his hands on the apron of a grandmother who stood in her doorway, looking frantically in every direction but seemingly afraid to take a step. Her hands dripped liquid shit, pouring from her fingertips. Cooper and Nixon turned down a narrow lane crisscrossed with laundry lines.

“I always wanted to live on a riverboat, you know,” Nixon said, tucking his thumbs through the belt loops of his short pants.

“Really?” Cooper asked, incredulous.

Nixon scrunched up his face. “Of course not, idiot. There’s only one thing I ever wanted to be.” The unboy cackled and leapt over a puddle. “A classmate once said he’d voted for me no fewer than twenty times, for one student office or another, before I graduated from school. I, friend, am very good at becoming what I want to be.” Nixon bit his lip. “. . . And a little less good at staying that way. Here we are.”

A barge waited at the quay. A woman the shape of a box stood quiet at the helm, and an old man with long yellow- gray hair and a soup- stained beard waved a hand toward Cooper. Nixon hopped back and forth on each foot, impatient to be away. “This is Captain Bawl,” he said to Cooper, dipping his head at the square helmswoman, “she’s taking us to the middle of the action.”

“Hello, hello, bluebird!” The old man waved almost girlishly, smiling a great big hello in Cooper’s direction. “You’re awake now.”

“I am!” Cooper agreed. “Was I otherwise?” He stepped onto the barge, which pushed off immediately.

“Don’t ask, Cooper.” Sesstri’s voice came from behind the captain. She sat cross-legged on a crate, reclining against the wooden shed that served as the barge’s cabin. She had a book in her lap and a brown cigarillo dangling from the corner of her mouth. “Don’t. Fucking. Ask.”

The old man pulled at his yellow beard. “Weren’t we all, my son? Otherwise and unawake, all of us.”

Nixon rolled his eyes and hopped up onto a cargo crate.

The cube of woman at the helm grunted apologetically, steering them out of the Guiselaine’s narrow passages. “You’ve been aboard the Barge Brightly before, in a sack with a lump on your head.”

“I have?” Cooper looked at her—she looked, well, tough was a word. “When?”

Sesstri leaned forward to drop-kick one of her books off the side of the barge. “I warned you,” she said before returning to her reading; her poise looked effortless, even on what smelled like a trash scow.

The old deckhand held his arms wide open and proclaimed, “The mystic deliria, the madness amorous!”

Captain Bawl nodded in the old man’s direction. “Old Walter there has the gist of it: we bore you to La Jocondette not three nights ago.”

“Oh, thanks for that. It turned out to be really . . . helpful?”

Sesstri made a face.

“You aren’t angered?” Bawl asked. “Offended? Inspired to vengeance?”

“Walter, it’s nice to meet you.” Cooper gripped the old lunatic’s hand and exchanged a refreshingly cordial hello, then answered the captain. “No, Captain Bawl, the worlds are ending. Or something. Kidnapping is water under the bridge at the moment.” Bawl dipped her head ambiguously.

The old man flashed Cooper a conspiratorial smile, his eyes brimming with yellow fire from the torchlight. “I share the midnight orgies of young men, I dance with the dancers and drink with the drinkers.”

“That sounds fun. Who are you quoting?” Cooper asked. It sounded like a quotation, anyway.

Walter puffed out his chest. “The words of my book nothing, the drift of it everything.”

Cooper patted the old man on the back, still filled with an odd, prophylactic glee—Walter felt more solid than his bony wrists and shoulders indicated. “You should be published, Walt.”

Walter giggled, and dug his pole into the water with particular gusto. “Seeking something yet unfound though I have diligently sought it many a long year, singing the true song of the soul fitful at random.”

A derisive snort came from Nixon’s side of the barge. “You’re both East Coast faggots.” Nixon sighed matter-of-factly, nodding at the old man. “But at least he’s famous.”

Cooper looked at the old man and refocused his vision as he’d learned to do. He saw a namesign shimmer beneath the red chicken-skin of Walter’s neck: a worn folio bearing a union star and, stuffed between the pages, tufts of grass. The sign struck an unexpected chord, and as Nixon threw stones into the water, Cooper thought he might know the weathered deckhand.

“Walt . . .” Cooper marveled under his breath, a ghost from lit class rising up from his muddled memory. “You’re already published, aren’t you?”

Walter bobbed his head with enthusiasm. “. . . And I will show that nothing can happen more beautiful than death.”

Cooper looked up, distracted by black figures jackknifing across the faces of the buildings overhead, and Captain Bawl cursed a string of blue pearls that would have made a Shanghai sailor blush. “Them again. Walter, can you outrace the bastards?”

To that, Walter laughed—pealing his joy into the day. Cooper just then realized that the morning sun was a trio of violet orbs, and had been since it peeked out over the tops of the buildings. He hadn’t even noticed what flavor the sky chose to be, today. I’m getting used to this, he marveled, uncertain how he felt about that.

“Ha!” Walter pointed his finger at Cooper in some kind of recognition. “Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself; I am large, I contain multitudes.”

“OK.” Cooper nodded. “Then I won’t worry about it.”

“Attaboy.” Walter poled them beneath a low bridge supported by double- sided, gape-mouthed stone faces, and suddenly the Dome was all Cooper could see—green and copper and gold and light in the distance, a cobbled desert separating them. The canal ran straight toward it, down the middle of the yawning plaza.

Nixon padded across the deck and joined his countrymen at the prow, impressed by the view. He put his small hand on Cooper’s shoulder but kept his peace.

Cooper gave Nixon a sidelong glance. “Walt, you’re not the first dead American I’ve met, but you’re by far the nicest. Also, I did my thesis on ‘Song of Myself.’ It’s a shame you have to go so crazy to keep up around here, but I reckon that bird is already half-cooked as far as yours truly is concerned.” Cooper leaned against the prow of the swift but unlovely barge and couldn’t help wondering how many folks back home would pay more than a finger or some back meat to have the conversations he’d had over the last week, and how miserably he’d squandered each opportunity. Still, he couldn’t think of anything to ask the transcendentalist poet beside him.

“Anyway, thanks for not being a dick or trying to steal my shirt.”

Walt gave him an ogle from one wild eye, the other squinted against the sun. “Have you learned the lessons only of those who admired you, and were tender with you, and stood aside for you? Have you not learned great lessons from those who braced themselves against you, and disputed passage with you?”

Nixon elbowed Cooper hard, and Cooper relented. “Okay, fine, but that’s kind of beside the point, isn’t it? I learned lessons I’d rather forget from the people who, um, braced themselves against me.”

Walter rolled his eyes. “Sack up, kid.”

“Amen, Whitman,” Nixon agreed.

Unable to argue with that, Cooper sat down on the deck of the barge and swung his legs over the foul canal water foaming beneath the keel, and as they sped toward the gold- green eye gazing down at the city from the horizon, even the black flies of the Undertow ignored them. He wondered what he was supposed to do now, down there, in the machine below the Dome.

Behind him, Sesstri grunted and cursed the canal.

Walter leaned down, one gnarled hand atop his pole and quoted himself again, whispering into Cooper’s ear a sentence’s worth of advice that Cooper had been flayed, fucked, and forced to learn already—but which bore repeating: “Let your soul stand cool and composed before a million universes.”

Killilly leaned into the wind that had arisen from nowhere and now streamed out of the Dome in all directions. From her vantage at the southwestern corner of the cobblestone desert that surrounded the Dome, the commander of the Undertow forces examined her prize. The Dome loomed like a god-sized soap bubble, lit from within by a thousand shades of green and gold, looping whorls of oxidized copper and bronze, anodyne steel and titanium, spanned by curved glass that even at this close range looked like a bauble she should be able to reach out and pluck. Soon enough she would do just that.

The gargantuan hemisphere had begun to move, splitting down the sides. Five Dome- sized wedges began to open, achingly slow and with a sound like the ground was coughing itself to death. From between the cracks, air and light spilled out.

The skylords had ridden south to war, and their passage left ink-black contrails in the morning sky. Already the sky above the Dome darkened with their gathering presence, still seething at the loss of their paper queen in Purseyet. Killilly had no idea how the Lady of La Jocondette had Died, and she was thankful for it: destroying the praetors and conquering the Dome had never been a sane quest, and the sooner abandoned the better. Taking advantage of the sudden opening of the Dome, now that was the kind of crazy Killilly could support, policywise— she could soften up a few cage-weakened praetorian turkeys, or at least throw fresh Undertow recruits at them long enough for her to decently sack the place.

Conquest was a sucker’s game. Looting, on the other hand, was the sport of survivors.

Killilly cut off her giggle when a lone skylord veered away from the procession above and plummeted toward her position. She stood up straight and watched a quiet meteor of black fog and fur streak across the cobbled plain, speeding in her direction until it landed in a cloud of dark vapor at her side— and then a prince of freedom rose, lifeless and ever-living, to gape at her from eye sockets brimming with green fire. Acid green, antifreeze- green, obsinto fumes and pond slime. As always, Killilly sensed a mocking undertone to the skylord’s lingering glances.

Most of her was terrified— another part, small and much- abused, stared longingly at the silver- striped black pelt the skylord wore. Those furs cost a fortune, Killilly knew; did they warm the skylord’s frost-cold bones? Killilly thought that she would like a coat like that.

Like all of its siblings, the skylord’s elegance remained irrefutable. Silver hair curled under its naked jawbone, scraps of flesh fluttered in the breeze and made the skylord’s skull look feathered. Gold hoops hung where its earlobes must once have been, but despite the jewelry and the frosty wig the lord’s gender remained unspecified. Killilly supposed gender became little more than a footnote once your flesh flaked away and your generative organs melted off in a slurry of rot.

“Emily?” it asked, not having bothered to learn Killilly’s name since she’d replaced the last Charnel Girl captain.

“Yes, Lord?”

“I sssee we ssstill haven’t begun the charge,” the skylord observed, breaking its wry silence.

“No, Lord.” Killilly nodded in obeisance.

“Ah.” It glanced at her booted feet, then at her leggings, and Killilly imagined it lifting a spectral eyebrow at the cut of her tattered black top. She tugged at her clothes in a largely symbolic attempt to tidy herself. “Are you, perhapsss, expecting usss to provide you another army to lead?”

“No, Lord.” Killilly stared at the ground and felt her face flush. It’s never good enough, is it?

“I sssee . . .” The skylord looked upward, its bony neck parodying grace. “If you don’t lead my army into the Dome as it opensss, girl, I’ll have to assssume you aren’t ssseriousss about your future. In thisss organization. . . orin the worldsss themselves.”

“Oh god, Lord, no, I’m . . . I’m completely serious, I swear!”

“I sssee.” It coughed a lick of green fire into its claw and dismissed her from its thoughts. “That’sss all.”

Killilly raised her fist— she wore Hestor’s spiked gloves—and whooped with joy as she led her troops to their deaths. The afterbirth bore fruit queer and wondrous.

The Cicatrix flexed the polyvinyl chitin corsets of her segmented abdomen, trying to perform the old womb-workings that were once her highest form of magic. That was long ago, now, before she abandoned a strictly biological existence—she had always accomplished the walk- between-worlds with a visceral adeptness, flexing her instrument of creation to initiate a number of arcane tasks—from controlling the weather before a hunt to dilating a window into another world, as she tried to do now. She could almost conceive of herself as a being with womanly abilities again, after a fashion. She was like Rousseau’s butterfly, the autumn- leafed lovewing whose pattern persisted beyond the end of its original existence, made of ash and shadow, inverted but there.

These days, her pattern persisted within a synthetic body that snaked around her lair in coils as thick as the eldest oak, and her female parts were less . . . womanly. Still, she commanded more than enough power in her graphene pudendum to open a path to the City Unspoken. What she did not expect was the rush of life from the svarning— all she’d fed it and more— so much life it touched her synthetic womb array and kindled within her a kind of maternal instinct for the machine.

The Cicatrix had planned to pluck up her daughters as she arrived, so she could draw upon their wholeness, such as it was. Now she would do so simply to awe them with her dominance. She herself would need time to pass the sheer length of her physical body across the worlds, let her daughters midwife her as she birthed herself into the heart of the Dome She grunted and bore down to initiate the transit. The air stretched thin, and thinner, until she pushed through the wall of reality with a snapping sensation; it came as a relief even as it stung what remained of her flesh and stressed the systems that monitored her physical integrity. As she passed through the no-place that swaddled the worlds, the Cicatrix flickered her forked tongue and scented her way toward her goal. There was the Sea of Remembered Skies, there the beast that migrated through its starry shoals, and there the city bound to its back. And all of it stank of CooperOmphale, the trickster who’d invaded her body. Corrupter of the sacrosanct. She would suck the marrow from his bones as a digestif, after she glutted herself on the ancient engine, or cracked it like an . . .

What? Closer at hand, as she slithered into the amniosis of the world, the Cicatrix readied her systems to pierce the veil that protected the Dome and the prize within it, only to discover that the signal was gone. The vivisistor buried beneath the Dome had died. Her life, it no longer bled out toward hidden secrets. That. That was . . .

That was not right. That met not with her wishes. A vivisistor-bound pixie screamed a trochaic error report that streamed across the narrow log window on the left side of her field of vision: open syslog // opened window // closèd Dome: event badapple.

She sensed the perfumed biosigns of her daughters and reached for them, even as she screamed fury through her systems—electricity arced between her eyelashes, her horns, her clawed fingers. The fey spirits inside her vivisistors cried out in tandem, at once enraged and tortured; every circuit of her systems fried itself with hunger for the energy signal that had vanished, and the slow dying that felt like love. The chains had plucked the pin from the pixie, and the song from the machine beneath the Dome— so long and so constant a presence in her head—ceased.

Woe. Woe. Woe. W0e. W03. VV03.

Something feral had grown from the integration of her native self into her amendments, and the Cicatrix liked to think it was a presence not unlike her soul.

Perhaps what she felt from the ancient vivisistor beneath the City Unspoken was nothing more than the attraction of two similar souls. Fated machine souls.

Wurk of wundr.

When the soul of the ancient vivisistor died, the Cicatrix screamed.

It was a w0rk of w0nder and you know it.

Involuntarily she gnashed her silver teeth. She let her weapons systems rant, as she could ill-afford to silence them before battle. At least they praised the patchwork wonder that was her soul. Yes, praise. Yes, soul. Yes.

W3 sh0uld ch4ng3 th4t. . . .

Lallowë’s fury expressed itself in a brittle exactitude as she walked from her dressing room into her workshop and, in quick succession, whipped the back of her fist through the precise center of every clock and clockwork device that hung on the wall. Glass shattered, tinkling as it fell to the parquet—and shattered again, and again. Over thirty smashed gearworks of her own design crunched under her booted heel, mingling with pulverized porcelain clock faces and pins capped with flea-sized sapphires and rubies.

Lallowë slapped her Cooper-powered vivisistor down on her worktable and considered reducing it to a similar fate. All that work for nothing, only to bring her back.

That her mother had known how the vivisistors worked this whole time was no upset—but bringing her sister back to life, that stung. Was it really necessary to force Lallowë to endure the dismissal of her hard work and the return of her competitor in the same moment? Misdirection was a useful tool, of course, it made sense that her mother would want to test her abilities— after all, if she hadn’t been capable of reverse engineering the vivisistor, Lallowë wouldn’t have considered herself fit to replace her mother as queen.

Watching Almondine’s return, seeing her stroll through into the bathing room—her bathing room—made Lallowë so angry that she couldn’t feel her face. All she wanted was to destroy, a favorable temperament for an Unseelie ruler: unstoppable chaos paired with the turbulent egotism that fueled the trebled pursuits of glory, freedom, and vengeance.

Was Lallowë so disposable that she could be given a fool’s errand— an intricate, arduous one at that—only to have all of her work dumped into the rubbish bin at the last minute? To clear the way for the Cicatrix’s true heir? Lallowë wanted nothing more than to smash her vivisistor, gut her fucking sister, and leave this city to its dogs.

She stopped for a moment as a sharp bolt of pain passed through her temples, and then again. The marchioness put one hand to her head when the pain took her breath away, but the ache passed. She was overwrought, that was all. That had to be all.

Lallowë looked at the spurs of turquoise that grew from her nail beds, filed and buffed to resemble the lacquered nails of a wealthy lady. She wanted nothing so much as to slip off her clothes and sprint through the streets, garlanding herself in the entrails of anyone unlucky enough to cross paths with her. She’d cloaked her true nature for too long, and now it gnawed at her, demanding to be released.

But that was not a yen she could satisfy, was it? Not with her mother and sister bearing down on her, crowding her city and disrupting her carefully crafted life. Dismissing all of her efforts, which were of course heroic.

Pain shot through her head again, more tellingly. She even felt a pain in her gut, which could only mean one thing. She hadn’t much time.

Mother.

With grim humor, Lallowë congratulated herself on her foresight; she had written herself an exit strategy, after all, anticipating that no endeavor between her mother and herself could end without some fraction of betrayal. Lallowë thought the embryonic program quite clever, although she wasn’t at all certain what good it would do her now.

She would find out. Linking her reengineered vivisistor to the coding shell with small-gauge silver chain, Lallowë clipped the chain to contact points on either side of the device as well as to the polished abalone ports on the underside of the cabbage- sized shell. Inside, Cooper’s severed finger twitched in protest as the glyphs and circuits his blood powered accepted the connection and were updated with the final code.

Using a turquoise nail, Lallowë sliced open the flesh of her upper arm—nearly to the bone. She slipped the disc- shaped ovoid into the wound, not wincing as it burrowed between her bicep and triceps; the biomechanics had been easy to program—the machine was designed around living tissue and seemed to want to incorporate itself into living systems. Blood called to blood through a matrix of electricity and enchantment, knitting together the function of her body with the vivisistor.

She felt it slide into place at last, finding a home inside her body, then a tingling sensation as the vivisistor integrated itself into her neuromuscular wiring, extruding filaments that wove themselves into her nerves and bones. It really was a marvel she’d created—Lallowë knew without undue hubris that she’d improved upon the original design in several critical places. Through her still-burning resentment she realized that had likely been Mother’s hope, to keep the full truth from her daughter and allow Lallowë an opportunity to excel.

Perhaps she should feel grateful for that. Perhaps in her way she already did.

She waited for something to happen, but nothing did. She sat at her vanity for a long time, staring into the mirror at her own reflection. Jadegreen eyes, pouty lips, skin like porcelain, eyes tilted just a degree too steep to be fully human. Even as a half-breed, Lallowë Thyu had always considered herself the consummate faerie— at least as reckoned by the Unseelie side of the fey divide. She sometimes wondered how true the tales of the original feykin could possibly be, or the schism between Seelie and Unseelie fey. Both factions had long ago ceased to exist, their descendants scattered across the worlds. There were dozens of fey civilizations now, and the ruins of twice that number, from worlds- spanning kingdoms like the Seven Silvers to small communities interwoven with their human counterparts. What use was a war between chaos and order when both seemed requirements for even the most basic existence? And yet her Unseelie heart beat in double-time to the thrill of the hunt, the wild whirling dance of death that marked the children of the Airy Dark. Oak and thorn, blood and wine, starlight and firelight, and the smells of sex and murder. Earth, sky, rain.