The Waking Engine (9 page)

“I threatened to make you into dinner, you know,” Asher said, aware that the marquis was only half listening.

Oxnard spilled more drink on his fine red coat and was trying to lick it off, so Asher took enormous pleasure raking in the marquis’ chips. Relieving Terenz-de-Guises of this much coin was a delight, no matter how badly he’d bungled things. The man had been winningly handsome before he’d married, and even five years of excess had merely cushioned his good looks. He always wore a red footman’s jacket when he went carousing—it was nominally a disguise, except that everyone knew the marquis by sight and he didn’t help matters by using his actual given name as an alias and letting everyone address him as “milord.”

For all his faults, the marquis did possess a fabulous memory of the conversations he’d had, sober or otherwise. And since he drank frequently and with company both great and inconsequential, Asher had found he made for an excellent source of information. More so, the marquis was that rarest of creatures: a willing source of information. If he’d been more self- aware, he might have been termed a gossip, but in his dissipation Oxnard embodied something that resembled a revolving door for idle chatter.

“My friend,” the marquis repeated, “I still do not understand why you are cross with me. I had a spot of news, heard from a wee bird about a package arriving today, and so I passed the news along. Is the erroneous chatter of birds the birdwatcher’s fault, my good man? I think that it is not.”

“My friend”—Asher’s good mood hid a dangerous undercurrent—“is this wee bird a faerie bitch you regret marrying?”

“On the contrary, she’s been an enabler par exemple, even if she is a little evil. I only mentioned whatever-it-was to you because I hoped you’d get there before she could.” Oxnard rolled his eyes. “And why is it always about my wife? I could never regret my ruthless angel. Her skin like porcelain, her ears like pointed daggers, her hair that falls so straight and black . . . and though she does loathe you, mi amor is not responsible for every ill that befalls you, certainly.”

“But she’s responsible for this one.” Asher pushed the matter. “What was it, a divination? A scrying bowl? Sheep guts? How did you—she— know what we would find?”

Oxnard set aside the dice and rested his palms flat on the table. His eyes didn’t glitter now. “My mother-in-law,” he said, “is a creature I make every effort to avoid, even on a conversational level. Hai?”

Reluctantly, Asher nodded. “Hai.” Best not to push a nobleman when he pushes back, but his thoughts spun: Lallowë’s mother? Asher knew the marchioness was fey, but could confirm little else. Bells, were faeries involved with this?

Oxnard continued as if the matter had never arisen. “My father, the late marquis, was ever fond of reminding his friends and relations not to seek answers from the astral planes, and I for one have always followed that advice. To wit: you’ll marvel at my entirely terrestrial source of information from no less a place than within the Dome, where my kind are imprisoned. But me? Not only am I free of the wretched place, I get regular updates.”

Asher looked doubtful. “The Dome is sealed. It’s impossible to get word in or out.”

Oxnard chuckled. “You sound so certain, my friend, as if you’d sealed it up yourself. But it’s a big glass bubble—who’s to stop a well-placed informant from jotting down notes and holding the paper up to the windows for anyone to read?”

“Is that how you operate, Terenz-de-Guises?”

“Of course not, mon ami, but you see my point. Nothing that big is secure, man. Why, a good Coffinstepper could crack the vault all by herself. Would you like to hear the latest?” Oxnard toyed with the rings on his fingers.

“You know I do.”

“My comrades from the Circle Unsung, it seems, have started to Kill one another.” His smile was deep and self- satisfied. “Capital K. Gone, obliterated.”

“That’s not possible.” Asher waved away the notion. “True Death is a gift granted only to those who have lived enough to earn it. No man can Kill.”

Oxnard raised his brows and stared at Asher for a long moment, a moment pregnant with an unspoken challenge. Then he looked away, brushing crumbs from his fingers. “I’m afraid that’s old news and no longer true if, indeed, it ever was. The Circle seems to have found a way . . . They uncovered a Weapon that Kills. Locked up for five years in the seat of True Death has, apparently, spurred my fellows toward ingenuity. I can’t say more, of course, without forsaking my own oaths to the Circle, but yes— the governing council of nobles has, twice now, Killed their own members in rather egregious waves.”

“How disturbing.” Asher did not sound disturbed.

The marquis smirked. “The Circle engaging in group Murder isn’t disturbing, it’s an extension of their basic nature. The bastards hate each other, but they’re incapable of acting independently. No, what’s really disturbing is the fact that someone inside the Dome has taken it upon themselves to become a vigilante. There’s a Killer, now—a single man or woman with access to this Weapon and the tenacity to use it.”

Asher rolled his eyes. “Now you’re just telling stories . . . milord.” Oxnard waggled his finger. “Just this week, two Tsengs and a dozen stableboys were Killed by a single attacker. My informant witnessed the Murder firsthand. Here, have a quince, man, they’re altogether too delectable to avoid. Some nutrition will put the color back in your skin.”

“My skin never had any color, milord,” Asher reminded the nobleman. “How interesting.” The marquis did not sound interested. “I’m impressed with your resourcefulness, but tales from the Dome are hardly relevant to those of us on the outside. Where are you taking this?” Asher asked. Madness inside the Dome—that no longer concerned him. Let them destroy each other. The madness outside threatened far more than the status quo.

“You and I, pale vagrant, we are an odd pair to be friends, wouldn’t you say?”

Asher nodded.

“And friends love nothing more than to help one another, non? I have helped you, I think you’ll see. And in return I ask nothing. However . . .”

Asher cursed.

“However, there is something of sentimental value I seemed to have mislaid. A bauble, an heirloom— a box of red metal, about the size of a jewel box, open along one side, but otherwise unremarkable.”

“You want a jewel box?”

“I want nothing. But if ever a friend should come across my lost jewel box, why, nothing would make me gladder than to see it again.”

Asher shrugged. “Fine. I’ll keep an eye out.”

“Just the one eye?” Oxnard hailed some of the staff and waved at the tabletop. “I suppose that will do.”

Asher pinched the bridge of his nose as two barmaids hurried over. He felt a headache coming on. The marquis continued.

“Now let me ask you this— girl, more wine—what would you have done— girl, no, other-girl, bring us a second platter of cheeses, the quince is rather woodsy all by itself—if you had found whatever it was that you thought I promised you? Your cup is empty, by the way—other-girl, never mind the cheese, just find the first one and hurry her up, we’ve two empty glasses now, two.”

“I’m sorry?” Asher asked, genuinely confused.

“I asked,” sighed the Marquis with exaggerated patience, “what you would have done if you’d found anything where I sent you?”

“I didn’t say I found nothing,” Asher muttered. “It just wasn’t helpful.”

“Are you certain?”

“About as certain as can be, yes, milord.”

“Well”—the marquis flashed his pretty blue eyes and reached unsuccessfully for the rear end of a nearby serving girl—“that’s not terribly certain, is it?”

“What do you mean?”

“Only that portents are notoriously vague, eh? Isn’t that rather the point of saying sooth—that the answer will somehow make sense to someone, and therefore be validated? ‘A red door and a house on fire!’ Now that could mean any number of things, for instance.”

“I suppose . . .” Asher didn’t suppose any such thing. Cooper was not what he’d been promised.

“If that’s the case”—the marquis smiled at his own reasoning—“why not take whatever it is you did find and do something with it. Whatever you intended your next step to be.” He waved his hands in mock secrecy. “Not that I’m remotely curious about the details, of course. Your business is your own, I’m sure.”

Asher frowned.

Oxnard rolled a broken chip across his knuckles. “I can only imagine what my wife must be feeling now, to have her prize snatched from beneath her watchful, exotic brows. A lady like ma cherie would never mope and whine and gamble. Why, she’d be planning . . . something painful, I’m sure.”

Asher’s frown deepened.

The marquis pushed the remainder of his losses to Asher’s side of the table, almost spilling his beer in the process. Every eye in the room was on that pile of chips, and Asher discreetly swept them into his satchel.

“Don’t forget the broken one, friend.” The marquis tossed the broken chip he’d been toying with onto the table and smiled dismissively. On the chip, someone had drawn a crude profile, a long-haired woman with an overlarge nose. Terenz-de-Guises stood to leave the Guile & Gullet for fresher meadows. “I’ve told you my heart’s desire and given you all my chips, what’s left to say? And if you’ve got nowhere else to start on your little project, then any old hole is as good as the next, eh? You’ll excuse me for needing to relocate, but the dinner hour has passed. Other wenches to grope, you know.”

Lallowë Thyu twitched an eyebrow in consternation at her empty wineglass. She sat in a solarium paned with glass and black lead, filled to capacity with lush plants. Leaves like slabs of green steak dripped water into sluice-runs carved into the stone floor, and exposed root systems that crept over stone pots and the moss- stained feet of statues set among the hothouse bloom. Surrounded at her table by an immensity of white petals, the Marchioness Terenz-de-Guises looked the picture of courtly femininity: petite, dark of eye and hair, primped to apparent helplessness.

But upon closer inspection, Lallowë Thyu’s delicacy was an illusion. She was thin but whip- strong, and her copper-oxide eyes simmered with a cruel tenacity. She wore a sleeveless blouse of gray- green silk that matched her eyes, and her feet were bare except for a coat of clear lacquer upon the filed turquoise chips that grew from her toes in place of nails.

She exhaled a string of birdsong curses in her native tongue that could have stripped the lead from the windows and pondered for the hundredth time why she’d bothered to marry rich in the first place. Oxnard, the Marquis Terenz-de-Guises, had been the perfect patsy, but it was not as simple to master life as a married woman as it was to master the man. Now she had a house hold to run, a district to govern, and cryptic orders from her mother to obey. Cryptic, and increasingly disturbing. And the bloody eyeball atop the ice cream sundae was—she’d missed the boy. And then seen him with Asher.

A queen of faerie made for an odd parent under normal circumstances, and these were anything but. Air and darkness were one thing; madness and monsters were part of their culture, but what her mother had become . . . and the new name she’d taken: the Cicatrix, queen of scars. Scabbed with metal and plastic. Lallowë shuddered, and obeyed.

Past the archway that exited the solarium, down the parquet hall and through a series of dressing rooms hung reams of expensive parchment paper. Several nights ago a message had appeared, as they did, upon one long sheet: a missive from the Cicatrix, containing orders.

They were odd orders. Brief and plainly written, which was itself unusual, they mentioned a location and the description of a man, and a single untranslatable word. Svarning.

Setting the word aside, Lallowë had considered what to do. Mother provided the details of the human’s arrival, but had given not so much as a hint as to what to do with it. Him. She had to stop doing that.

For once, Lallowë erred on the side of caution. To be certain, she would enjoy ripping the guts out of the meaty childborn that seemed so abruptly important, but without knowing why he was important, she risked her own evisceration. The Cicatrix was not a forgiving parent—or, at least, she was forgiving no longer. Lallowë’s sister had taken care of that.

So Lallowë had waited in her carriage, idling at the corner of Dismemberment and Ruin. Tam had tried to catch her attention, but was Lallowë really expected to pay attention to every corpse that woke up in that beige, lifeless neighborhood? She’d expected some flash, at least a little colored smoke to catch her attention. It was hardly her fault that she’d missed one chubby human slung over the back of a man painted to blend in with the clouds.

Arrangements had been made. If there was one thing Lallowë had learned from the Cicatrix, it was to nest your best plans inside better plans. The Lady would tell Lallowë what this Cooper meant, and how well he played the game. Lallowë needed a new player; she grew bored of picking apart this city one guild, shopkeep er, and vagrant at a time. Asher still vexed her when he could, as he had today, but he was a limited, broken creature.

She closed her eyes pictured her childhood home—before it had been spoiled—trying to summon the peace of the bowers of the Court of Scars. Recurved branches like cathedral ceilings or longbows, the yellow and blue suns that chased each other across the sky, the lithe limbs and swooning embraces of her kin. She yawned, homesick, even though the home she remembered no longer existed.

Even the marchioness was answerable to someone. Not her husband, who by all rights should have been the governing force within the district and his home, but was not. In fact, as one of the few members of the aristocracy who’d escaped the prince’s insane imprisonment within the Dome, the marquis could have seized some measure of power and dragged this city back into a semblance of order. But that was pure fantasy; he’d been a dandyfop to begin with, and since his marriage to the “foreign exile,” Lady Thyu, Oxnard Terenz-de-Guises had gone both to ground and to seed. These days he was rarely seen— and never seen sober. Which of course was why it had been so easy to steal control of the family fortunes, and everything else besides.