The Waking Engine (48 page)

The marchioness waved her fingertips in response, sending ghost fingers trilling up his spine. They were connected now, blood to blood and back again. Cooper knew with a sudden insight that if she were injured, he would feel it.

Oh yes, and feel it doubly. He heard Lallowë’s whisper inside his head as she held out her arm to show him the scar. The stump of Cooper’s little finger twitched—he felt its tip twitch below Lallowë’s bicep.

I know what you are and it is vile, Lolly. Cooper thought his accusation at her like a slap on the cheek, and was glad when she shook her head, glaring at him. At least the enhanced call quality worked both ways.

Purity gasped horribly—a lich wrapped its arms around her, and she sagged, turning pale. The lich wore huge sunglasses that did not quite contain the smolder of the yellow- green coals burning in place of its eyes, and a gold tennis bracelet. It chuckled wordlessly and pulled her away. Another landed beside Cooper with a grinding chuckle. A rusted claw found his shoulder and he, too, felt a numbing chill.

Only Sesstri remained standing, squared off against her sisters. She pulled Chesmarul’s book out of her satchel and began flipping through its pages with manic haste.

“Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you,” she recited under her breath like a mantra. She hadn’t seen any use whatsoever in poor Ms. Messerschmidt’s Urban Weather Patterns; that is, until undead monsters clad in black weather descended into her midst.

She began to recite a passage on the legal rights to air space and breathing rights. “According to . . . according to princely decree, the building, breathing, and flying rights or . . . or any subset thereof . . . may be remanded by . . .” She stopped momentarily as Nixon flew into the engine chamber, red-faced and huffing from a thousand stairs. Sesstri almost smiled. When Asher followed a moment later, wounded and bleeding, Sesstri’s smile gleamed.

Almondine stepped out from behind her sister without pretext and stalked toward Sesstri with murder on her otherwise expressionless face. It wasn’t murder Cooper needed special senses to see, and Nixon saw it too, his eyes wide in alarm.

Almondine whipped out her hand and grabbed Sesstri by the throat, jerking the taller woman’s feet off the floor. She drew back her other arm and prepared to smash Sesstri’s skull with her fist. “I think it’s time to end you now, Sissy. I will wear your lover’s gray skin at my coronation, and rekindle the hearts of my Wild Hunters with the tale of the fall of the last aesr—his daughter’s skull will make a splendid crown. Faerie fire shall burn your corpses without consuming your bones, limning my victory trophies for a thousand-thousand years on the pyres of triumph.” She fixed Sesstri with a slow-burning smile. “And you, Sissy, will be forgotten entirely. Like your father forgot you, and our mother.”

Sesstri made a sound of choking despair, and scrabbled for her knives to no avail. Messerschmidt dropped to the floor.

“Hey Doll!” Nixon shouted, pelting toward the women and pulling out his own weapon—the knife he’d looted from the dying Charnel Girl— as he ran. “You leave my pink bird alone!”

Almondine kicked him away without even looking. Nixon shot off like a cannonball and didn’t slow until his body hit the wall, his stolen knife shattering against the etched gold circuits. He picked himself up slowly, his mouth gaping a gory hole from Almondine’s kick to his face. His pointed nose was broken and most of his front teeth were gone, blood dripping onto his belly. Nixon looked at the bloody bone chips scattered across the floor of the great machine, felt at his toothless mouth with a pudgy little hand, and his eyes went black. Leveling his gaze at the tidy monster in the hound’s-tooth coat, he charged.

“Nixon, stay back!” Cooper shouted. “You little idiot!”

But Nixon leapt at the deranged faerie with a roar. “Stick it, sister!” he screamed, tackling Almondine at her knees—she folded in half and fell backward as Nixon’s momentum carried them both over the edge, tumbling into the pit. As their bodies spun through the air he exulted, “Nobody kicks the new Nixon!”

They landed with a splat on the slope of the depression, Nixon rolling away from the lethal faerie on impact. Her eyes wide as a cow’s, Almondine scrabbled desperately at the side of the golden bowl, slick with oily blood, but was unable to gain any purchase. Her cherrywood fingernails splintered as she slid toward the drain, and she lost her cool at last, howling once in fury before being swallowed by the darkness.

“Ha!” the unboy cackled in triumph, flattening himself against the slippery side of the pit even as gravity pulled him toward the same black hole. The deadly fall would not end for hundreds of feet, maybe thousands, in the caverns below the city.

Because of his small size, Nixon slid more slowly but just as decidedly toward the drain at the bottom of the machine chamber. Cooper threw himself toward the edge of the pit, but Nixon was out of reach. He didn’t struggle, but instead grinned up at Cooper and Sesstri as his body tipped into the drain. “I did it! I’m a good guy!” He raised his hands to flash twin victory signs and was flown away.

Quiet claimed the air for a long minute after Nixon’s sacrifice. Then Lallowë stepped forward, peered down at the hole at the center of the pit, and bared her teeth.

“May you find a pleasant waking, little unboy, Thank you for clearing my competition from the board.” She lifted an arm and waved her fingers at Sesstri. “And a fine hello to you, baby sister. Welcome to the fucking family.”

Sesstri shuddered but offered no reply. Cooper shuddered too; he could feel Lallowë’s sick satisfaction through the blood bond. Spirits of salt and stone and water danced within them, and between them, and beyond.

Asher threw himself toward his besieged daughter but was intercepted by four shadows—in less than an instant, they had snared Asher in a frame of darkness, night and day boiling where they touched. A fifth lich with a shiny brown wig over its shoulder spread its polished fingerbones across Asher’s face. He howled, dying a little to feed the vain abomination. His eyes went dark and dry as a corpse, and he sagged in his captors’ grip. But his bone-dull skin began to bleach itself brighter, appearing almost to shine.

Across the room, Prama stood her own again a circle of five hissing lich-lords.

“As I was saying.” Sesstri sounded dangerous. She recited Messerschmidt from memory now, with a swift efficient voice that gave even Lallowë pause. “According to municipal statutes, the building, breathing, and flying rights or any subset thereof may be remanded by royal decree, resulting in immediate expulsion from the City Unspoken and its environs.”

Asher could decree nothing but his own death rattle at the hand of his lich captors.

Light rekindled beneath his gray skin as it healed—the grayness flickered like celluloid film, then bleached itself to silver and white before their eyes. If Cooper had stood beneath a hundred flashbulbs, he might shine so bright. Spears of light from bright polyps lined Asher’s ribs, and his ragged clothes disintegrated.

Naked, Asher’s humanity was dispelled: ropes of muscle, lanky joints, a thatch of darker gray hair surrounding his generative organs—these faded as the scars between his ribs glowed brighter and brighter, pushing cysts of new cells into the puckered wounds, and as the lights under his skin intensified, the reality of Asher’s heritage asserted itself. His patrician nose elongated into a regal crest that stretched down below his chin and all the way up past the crown of his skull, and his eyes—flickering still between red and blue and green—blurred together until he gazed out from a single conjoined orb, ensconced within the bony crest that flew up and backward over his skull.

He reached out with one massive white-boned hand and grabbed Ambassador Rousseau by the face, as she held him. He squeezed, and silver light shattered her skull. The rest of her fell away like ash and costumery.

His four captors released their grip and backed away, but it was too late. Asher flared his rekindled light, and spears of silver-white brilliance pierced the four, nullifying them.

His resis tance gave the undead swarming Prama pause, and she took the opportunity to flare her own golden light, repulsing the lot of them a short distance, cast out in a circle around her. Father and daughter faced each other and, after nodding, bowed their heads and spread their wing- fins. Light arced above each of them.

From across the room, Prama’s gold light and Asher’s white light merged into a bridge of light that illuminated everything. All shadows were consumed by light cast by the aesr or reflected from the mirrored sphere around them. All shadows—even those constructed and maintained by necromantic perversion.

For a moment, it seemed to Cooper that every lich within the engine was caught in the flash of a paparazzo’s camera. The next instant, their bones collapsed in a hail, ringing off the metal floor, the anti-light that glued them together—their actual medium of existence—was simply banished. Vaporized by pure light generated by two wounded, pissed off First People.

Then the bridge of light faltered, and winked out as Asher and Prama gasped, sagging, each merely radiant, rather than blindingly brilliant.

Cooper wanted to exult in triumph, but the Cicatrix’s portal was convulsing—first contracting, then pulsing wider than before. Slowly, something began to push through. Something with an elongated, black head— a horned ovoid shape he imagined to be slick with acid blood, tail a mile long, vile. Cooper’s ghost finger pulsed in triple-time: his own blood pounding through it; Lallowë’s heart beating strong as a boxer in her chest; and the song-to- song countermelody of the vivisistor to its siblings, clustered within the Cicatrix like intentional tumors: brainstem, wrist, heart, womb.

He sensed her considerable bulk and again marveled at how large she’d been able to grow, from the seed of a such a small woman. A subway train of black claws and ozone breath, with no light in her but that of her life- fueled LED tattoos. Cooper could hear the maddened pixies already— they screamed for death inside her vivisistors.

WinterWinterWinter! GiveUsWinteryDeath, GiveUsAirAndDark, WinteryDarkyDeath, PullThePinsFromOurHearts, Cooper-Omphale, AndBleedUsDeadDeadDead!

“What is she?” Cooper asked Lallowë out loud; she didn’t need to speak to answer. They were connected by blood and machine now, and he could have overheard her fright-dappled thoughts anyway, had it occurred to him.

She is my mother and my queen and my bane. She calls herself the Cicatrix, the mistress of scars, and she will crack this city like an egg when she arrives.

Then Lallowë Thyu turned on her heel and ran.

Sesstri knelt at the lip of the circular pit where once a god had been pinioned by the Lash and bled its life into the engine that allowed the mortals of the worlds to achieve everlasting oblivion. An engine to end wakings.

She covered her face in her hands, not at all sure whether she wept for Nixon or because of the lies Almondine had told before she died. They were lies, she knew that much. They had to be. It was true that Sesstri had never known her mother, but she knew the woman had been a fierce soldier, a foreigner, and the only woman her father had ever acknowledged as his equal.

She can’t be, just can’t. Gods, her belly hurt.

Asher took Sesstri by the wrists and lifted her to her feet. On the far side, Prama hugged her knees and rocked herself back and forth, barely glowing at all.

“She’s coming,” Cooper pleaded to anyone who cared to listen. Only Purity seemed to hear.

“Can’t you stop it?” she asked Cooper, scrubbing her face to warm it.

A sucking sound drew Cooper’s eyes to the portal, which tore itself open inch by inch, acrylic blood chasing the etched channels as it dripped onto the floor. Cooper considered the branching, convergent tattoo of circuitry painted in purples and blues and blacks.

Within the portal, a shape began to resolve itself. Like a sketch, the lines that described her face appeared before the face itself resolved in the portal: the eyes of a woman gazing out from beneath a pronged helm, a pair of silver lips adorning the plate where her jaw should be.

Sesstri gasped in pain and nearly fell to the floor, sagging in Asher’s arms. She clutched her belly.

“What it is?” Asher asked with a voice full of concern.

“Womb magic,” Cooper answered. “I’ve been inside the Cicatrix, and she’s not quite woman anymore. I think that she’s drawing upon her daughters’ bellies to birth herself.” He grimaced. “I’m sorry, Sesstri, but it’s true.”

Blood to blood and back again. He could feel the blood they shared, the women and his coin machine.

The Cicatrix emerged from the pulsing ellipse headfirst, wailing with the effort as her arms slithered out of the canal, ceramic insulator discs mounted atop her shoulders popping audibly; she yawned, gasping for air as she struggled to push her shoulders into the world. Her perfect silver lips stretched wide and wider—and then they dropped down as her mouth plate slid past her throat, and she inhaled through a curtain of jawless meat.

Her horned helm scraped the edges of the portal, which sprayed dark fluids and electrical discharge into the air. One hand remained bare, white skin tweeded with overlapping scars—on the other she wore a wicked gauntlet with slits at the fingertips for her obsidian nails.

The polymerized faerie queen screamed when she saw that Almondine was gone.

Cooper clapped his hands over his ears, Sesstri and Purity following suit as the Cicatrix decanted herself into the world. Her amplified lamentation blared on for too long, her rage and loss venting from artificial lungs that snaked down through her thorax.

“My child! My heir!” In her grief the half-born Cicatrix thrashed with no concern for her own well-being, dashing her half-ton headgear against the metal floor until the entire engine room rang like a bell. Cooper thought she looked like some monstrous mermaid whose fish parts were sea serpent rather than tuna, and synthetic besides, her helm a crown of black coral, overgrown with a drowned beauty.

The half-birthed invader queen fell silent. She raised her torso and reared back, reclining into the cradling support of her polyvinyl serpent’s abdomen—still emerging from the portal, her segments dragged along by unnerving, insectile grasper arms— as she assessed the gathering of her enemies. When her eyes found Cooper, he saw the recognition—she had his scent, surely. His ghost finger itched— blood to blood to blood.

“You.” She spread obsidian claws at his face, thin as black ribbons and deadly as mamba fangs. “You are CooperOmphale, the boy who’s been inside me. Do you know what we do to intruders in the Court of Scars, man-child?” Her visor retracted halfway, exposing the lower half of her face, and she pulled her quicksilver lips into a grimace. Silver-lipped, eyes hidden behind a crescent of black plastic, corseted in braided aramid fibers, she looked a pop star pirate queen, ready to steal the show and the stadium with fireworks and neurotoxin. Cooper didn’t resist the abject terror the Cicatrix inspired.

But abjectly terrified or not, he had to do something. Cooper took a deep breath and extended his shamanic senses—sight beyond the world, sounds beneath the skin. He didn’t know just what to expect, but . . .

Well goddamn.

Like an earthworm pushing its way out of wet soil, the Cicatrix slithered from one world into another, and where she existed between the worlds, he could feel her. Feel her and . . . reaching out . . . he could grab her body with the hands of his spirit. In the infinitesimal vastness of the non-space that cocooned the worlds, his grip was strong.

“I am the Omphale.” He talked just so he could hear his own voice, to lend himself courage through vim and vulgarity. Cooper astonished himself with the clarity of the vision, he could feel her heart beat and the machine whir of the systems that brimmed with power bought by life. She was enormous; before, when he had inhabited her body on accident, he hadn’t the presence of mind to appreciate her sheer bulk.

He could feel her pulling herself toward the City Unspoken with frantic speed. And if he tried, if he bore down with his stomach muscles and bit his tongue, he could hold her there.

“Ha!” He laughed aloud. Sesstri flashed him a smile—if he killed her mother she’d have to thank him.

Cooper felt his body vibrating, not too differently from the vibrations of the chains beneath the city—how an airliner or a subway train might feel, urban and elemental and beyond his control . . . except that somehow it was within his control, which he exerted, bringing the freight train faerie queen screeching to an interdimensional halt. Nearly.

“She’s still coming. Shit, she’s a long- ass snake elf. Snelf.” Cooper ground his teeth, clenched everything, and bore down. He howled through his teeth, red-faced. “Your mother’s a snelf!”

“Shut up, turd!” Sesstri called, but the Cicatrix opened her quicksilver lips and spoke in a voice that deafened:

“My sovereign and core modules exist here, within the Dome, such as it is. Within the boundaries of the City Unspoken. The rest of me is merely luggage.” The queen raised one arm and her synthetic skin retracted to show an array of metal warheads. The armament dropped down in a loop of chain, a bandolier three feet long and bristling with quicksilver munitions. At the tip of each silvery warhead shone a lilac LED, and Cooper could hear the screams of vivisistor-pinioned lives within. “I think, Girl- Prince, that I will redecorate the ruins of your palace in a palette of reds. Let us start with the hot red paint inside all of your human slaves.”

“No.” Cooper and Sesstri said as one.

“You cannot stop me, Omphale, and the Manfrix girl cannot help you.” The Cicatrix stroked her massive, horned helm with her flesh hand. “My daughters with men are weak.”

“You have some fairly demonstrable design flaws,” Sesstri said, walking toward the queen. “You are wrong,” she spat, “and you will have none of me, Mother.”

Sesstri flipped a dagger in her hand, hilt up, and slammed the blade into her belly. She struck low and savage, feeling the edge scrape against her pubic bone, hoping to avoid vitals like the bladder and intestines, to damage only her reproductive organs. She gasped, eyes wide, then twisted the dagger with the last of her focus before folding in half and dropping to the floor.

Cooper felt frozen to the spot with horror as, with a suck of pressure, the pulsing oval clenched shut and vanished, severing the body of the foreign queen as neatly as a guillotine.

Her balance upset, the Cicatrix toppled forward, bracing her fall with her hands and shattering her black rapier nails; with the synthetic muscles anchoring her hips and torso to her wyrm-body severed, their remainder contracted reflexively, squirming like worms from the queen’s severed chassis and spraying brown engine oil across the golden floor. Her warheads clamored against the gold floor, their lights flashing faster now, alternating lilac and emerald green.