The Red-Stained Wings--The Lotus Kingdoms, Book Two

by Elizabeth Bear

  He might grind to a halt here in the storm before he answered these questions. He might spend eternity as a statue in a wasteland, trapped in a carapace that would not answer him, remembering friends who had died for the want of his assistance.

  The city was walking in the wrong direction. Away from the Singing Towers.

  Climb up, the voice that had given him so much advice of finality over the years whispered to him. Climb up, or die alive.

  * * *

  The city was hunting him. Hunting HIM, he thought, and not merely running before the storm.

  Otherwise he would have missed his opportunity, because by the time he had realized he should rush—what passed with him as rushing, right now—and clutch one of its knife-tipped spider-feet, it had danced away into the storm, taking its lights and voices with it.

  He would have cursed, but he was too busy forcing himself to turn.

  And then the city came back, and again passed over.

  It moved with dancing lightness for its size. It must be all hollow bones and cantilevered structures, all sails made of dragonwing and gears carved of dragonbone. There must be almost no substance to it, for how large it seemed. And that weight must be spread out very neatly over its endlessly cycling feet, because they did not cut deeply into the dragonglass and whatever lay beneath. They skittered, insectile. They danced.

  And each one still fell into just the place the one before had left. It seemed their reach was fixed, and when the city moved faster, its legs rippled more quickly, but did not take longer strides. Limited, he thought, by the span of connecting rods, the pivot of bearings. A pace precise, and machined.

  He wished he did not find the idea as soothing as he did.

  How did it move against the storm? Not just the wind. But the storm.

  However the city moved, the Gage did it through sheer will. His joints all grinding and complaining, his senses fogged by the whisper of the sand. He stepped, and stepped again, his metal body squealing and complaining. He forced himself by agonizing increments to the place where one of the walking city’s feet came down.

  The penultimate one lifted away through the nauseous green stormlight as he stepped beside it. He grabbed—too slow, with grinding arms. It whizzed over his head. He could see how the bevels, given any true light, would glitter.

  The final leg was descending. Unless the city made another pass, he would have this chance, and this chance only.

  The Gage positioned his hands. He reached out. He gambled. He argued with himself that the leg would be exactly where the leg had been before. He was a machine. His reckoning of the distance was precise in memory.

  He was nearly wrong.

  The foot came down on its needle-point, and the lattice was a half-span of his arm farther away than he had calculated. Was the architecture of the trailing edge of the city slightly attenuated? He did not have time to investigate.

  Gears shrieked. Sparks flashed from his joints. He was profoundly grateful that he was not equipped to feel physical pain. He felt something strip inside him. Something else bind.

  His arm shot out. His hand locked in a claw onto the trellised leg.

  It snapped upward, and bore him into the storm and the sky.

  * * *

  The Gage swooped into space, whirled like the weight on the end of a trebuchet. The shock of motion traveled from his gauntlet, along his arm, to the shoulder joint, down the overlapping plates of his carapace, to the trailing fingertips and feet. He snapped, and if he had still had a human spine within his metal body, the spine would have snapped as well. He had not expected the violence and speed of the motion, which looked so smooth and … riffling … from the ground.

  It seemed to shake some of the dust from his joints, anyway. Or maybe the shock spread his lubricant around. He moved more freely, and with mechanical strength managed to wheel his free arm around against the momentum of the swing as it was slowing. The strain stretched his linkages. He wondered about metal fatigue and shearing forces.

  He had wondered, more than once, what it might take to destroy a Gage. Perhaps this was it, and instead of an intact statue in an endless, poisoned waste, he would wind up a dismembered one.

  His free hand clutched at the dragonbone leg of the walking city, locked through the lattice, and gripped fast. His elbows flexed, grinding like broken axles, and pulled him close. Metal rang on metal, clear through the mumble of the storm.

  Whisper, mumble. He had thought he heard voices before, the babble of a crowd. Was it possible that he had heard not, as he assumed, the noise of a city-sized ship of the desert, but voices that were haunting the very wind? He hadn’t too much time to think about it, as the great leg slowed at the top of its arc and he saw the massive camshaft with its right-angle bends turning into a gap in the even more massive underside. The belly of the beast-machine was a convoluted, incomprehensible architecture of pipes and plumbing and belts of braided cable or dragonhide sliding liquidly through connection points. It reeked of heated metal … and lubricant.

  Something he was going to need.

  Lights blazed in among the machinery. They had a quality he was unfamiliar with: not witchlamps, and not flames. They cast shadows stark as the worst sun of this desert of terrible suns, the blazing blue one. They lit each individual grain of dust so that it cast a streaking shadow behind it, so that the texture of the storm was visible as it never would have been in mere daylight. It was harsh, gritty. One could almost feel the texture of sandpaper, of sharkskin, to gaze on it.

  As the arc of the ascending leg slowed, the Gage braced himself for the snap, the reversal of motion. The abrupt thrust down. He could see other legs through swirling dust, a long ripple of them stabbing downward like released bolts after their climactic pause. The dragonbone, for all it seemed to be metal and stone, must be extraordinarily light in its structure. This thing would crumple under its own weight, otherwise.

  He had options. He could climb, hand over hand, hauling himself up the lattice of the violently moving leg while the storm ripped at him and his joints progressively froze. Or he could wait out another cycle to get the timing and then let go before the top of the arc, and hope that either the momentum was enough to throw him into the undercarriage, or that he caught a higher point on the leg as he fell, for a net gain of absolute altitude.

  At least some of the voices were definitely in the wind. Lost souls crying and moaning. The ghosts of ancient words in a language he thought that he should understand.

  And some, he thought, were not haunted at all. Like the clarion shout, ringing as the cry of a ship’s lookout who spots land after many days becalmed, that hailed him as he rose out of the sea of etching dust and into the painful, angled light.

  The motion of the leg he clung to halted so abruptly that his own momentum almost shook him loose. His clenched fingers saved him, because he was a machine. They would tear off before they would unbend, if he so willed it. He huddled against the lattice while all around him, the ripple of motion continued down the line. Only his perch snapped up and locked in place with a thump that reverberated through the metal to which he clung.

  For a moment, he remained motionless: a limpet, a rabbit when the shadow of a raptor passes over. For a moment, which would have been the length of a held breath and then its shuddering release. If he still breathed.

  Then the moment was over. A wash of milder light fell over him, and there was a change in the tone of the wind. It whined, in addition to whispering and moaning. It whistled like the wind between the lines of a ship’s sails.

  Something moved toward the Gage from above, from out of the light of what must be a passage that had opened in the belly of the thing. A shape. A cage, on a cable. That was what the wind whistled through.

  Inside the cage was a man. He wore robes with a hood, and a mask that covered his face entirely. His hands were wound in bandages until the strips of cloth became gloves. His legs above his boots were similarly wound. His breath hissed within the
mask, the way Mrithuri’s hissed through the filters in the masks she wore when she held court in her throne room filled with golden dust.

  It is the same thing, the Gage thought, though it patently wasn’t at all. The dust that caked the surfaces of this mask was greenish, and it faintly glowed. But … there was the dragonglass that made up the ceiling of Mrithuri’s throne room. And maybe there was some root that bound the customs together, back there in the history of cultures.

  The Gage lifted his head, pushed his carapace away from the strut. The enclosure swung to beside him. It was open on one side, like a birdcage from which the bird has flown. The man within it held with one bandaged hand to a railing that ran around the inside.

  “Need a ride?” he said.

  * * *

  The man used a tool to grapple the cage in place against the frozen leg, extending a thing resembling a claw on a pipe with a trigger like the Dead Man’s guns that made it grab and latch. The Gage traversed the gap and mounted the platform without capsizing it, though he would not later be certain how. Once in, he did not try to stand, but crouched on the riveted plates of the floor. His body ground against itself. His joints were further stiffening.

  The Gage had some internal mechanisms for self-repair. What fool Wizard would build a final servant and ultimate weapon without them? But like all creatures, he needed time to heal.

  And a nice soak in a warm tub of oil would not hurt his chances for repair.

  The man released his claw, and they swung free. The platform swayed on its cables, which creaked under the Gage’s weight as well as whining in the wind. The Gage hoped his weight would not be the death of his rescuer.

  At least the dragonhide seemed strong.

  The swing corrected itself slowly, despite the assist it was given by the wind. The cage winched upward, and the Gage found himself relaxing into the hands of fate. They were still going in the wrong direction. He would correct that in time.

  For now, however, he might survive. And that was both so unexpected, and offered such an increased chance of completing his mission, that relief made him as giddy as if he could still become light-headed. If he’d been in the body he was born in … well, he wouldn’t have made it this far. But that aside, he probably would have collapsed, prone, and pressed his face to the metal floor.

  Rivets and all.

  They rose out of the storm. The wind stilled as the light surrounded them, and a moment later there was a grinding sound as a hatch slid closed below. The man with the claw swung down from the cage onto a deck of gray fabric—no, stretched leather … no, dragonhide. It dented under his boots, stretching slightly. Other people, as wrapped and masked as he, moved around the space that the Gage found himself in. It was as big and bright as the workshop of a Wizard of Messaline.

  “Bili, get a hose up here. Qi Len, the tracks on that hatch will need to be cleaned out after we’re through this rotdust. I’m headed to decontam.”

  The Gage stayed where he was. Now that he did not have to move, he could feel the damage the dust had done inside him, and there was no reason to aggravate it when he did not know, really, where he was, what these people’s intentions were, or what happened next. The man who had rescued him from the storm was obviously in charge, at least of these operations. The Gage could harm nothing by waiting.

  That had been a hard thing to learn, when he became a Gage. How often, in a situation where things were difficult, anxiety-provoking, or exciting in threatening ways—how often the best action was not to act at all, but to wait and conserve one’s self, and make plans.

  It was more satisfying to thrash.

  But a Gage who thrashed destroyed cities entire.

  Water ran over him with a hiss. It was warm, and soapy, and seemed to be pumped through a tube by two men working a handle while the third one pointed a nozzle at him. He was being cleansed, he understood. The poison dust washed off him, and out of as many of his crevices as possible. The used water drained away through a grate in the floor. He wondered how they got the poison out of it; surely in a desert such as this, no one could afford to waste water.

  “Can you understand me?” a voice asked. A masked man, the same one who had worked the nozzle.

  “Yes,” said the Gage. “I can.” As with all the other speakers here, the man spoke a dialect of his own native tongue of Messaline. The accent was strange and there were unfamiliar words embedded—what was “decontam”?—but on the whole it made good sense.

  “Can you stand and walk a little? Or shall I use the cage to move you?”

  The Gage considered. “I can walk. A little.”

  He rose from his knees, joints grating. He stepped out of the cage, which swung wildly as his weight shifted. He followed the man across the dragonskin deck, which supported his weight, but barely. With every step he thought he must punch through, but the stuff was otherworldly in its elasticity. He imagined the people who lived here down in the desert, harvesting the stuff off of the corpses of dragons, sewing it into the fabric of their home. Did they not know it was poison?

  Did they not know their whole home was poison?

  “Here we are,” the man said. “Step in.”

  They had stopped before a sort of tub, a little longer and wider than the Gage’s body, sewn from dragonhide. It was full of some viscous liquid, dark gold and reeking of plant esters.

  “What is this?” the Gage asked. His robes were mostly threads now. He picked the bit of dragonbone he had collected out of his pocket, and held it in his palm. The shreds of cloth he dropped onto the floor.

  “Almond and ylang-ylang oil,” the man said, mask-muffled. “Your machinery sounds like you could use it. There are strong magnets underneath; if you move around enough to dislodge the dragonbone dust, it should be drawn down to the bottom of the tub and stop fouling your gears.”

  The Gage lowered himself cautiously into the tub without another word.

  The oil was warm. The stretchy hide was like a hammock. It was—a peculiar concept to revisit after so long as a machine—sublimely comfortable. He did as suggested and stretched himself, opened his filters and purged them, pumped warm oil through every hollow chamber of his body. He was, though it would have seemed strange to most who observed him, mostly hollow inside. When he was filled with oil, and surrounded by oil, he did not feel heavy, for once.

  He was still lying there, relishing the sense of lightness, when the second man returned. “If you are refreshed,” he said deferentially, “the Master Mechanic will be able to see you now.”

  * * *

  The Gage was not surprised to learn that the Master Mechanic was the man who had descended to rescue him. After he rose carefully from his bath and allowed himself to drain, he was scraped down and then rubbed dry with polishing cloths. His guide then led him across the decking (he left grease stains that he assumed would probably sink into the leather and renew it, so they did not concern him overmuch) to a door.

  “It’s a pressure lock,” the guide said. “Do not be concerned.”

  That was another of those words the Gage had not previously encountered.

  A “pressure lock” appeared to be a door that shut behind one, uncannily like that of a cell. And another one that was already closed in front of one before one entered, presenting no immediate means of egress. Unless one tore it off the hinges, which seemed … unlikely to ensure continuance of the generous hospitality he had so far been receiving.

  He pushed into the cramped space and paused there. His pauldrons brushed waxed dragonskin walls. Waxed, of course, to keep contaminants from permeating the leather.

  He relaxed. He thought he understood.

  A sharp puff of air gusted around him. An evacuation, and then a gentler refill. Not quite as much air as had been evacuated, he thought. Little enough that he felt a lightness on his skin.

  The door before him opened, as he had assumed it eventually must. When he emerged, he found behind it a man.

  The man was of moderate size an
d a wiry, underfed build. He wore an undyed blouse and indigo trousers. He did not wear a beard, though it looked from the shadow on his cheeks as if his beard disagreed with this sartorial expression. His hair, curly and tall at the front in that manner that defied pomade, was the black of greased ebony. His skin was light olive, his cheekbones high.

  Just looking at him made the Gage feel heartsick, and homesick, and a little bit lost. It was the face of home. The face of young men lost too soon, young men lost in spite of being beautiful. Young men, perhaps, lost because they were beautiful.

  Down to the dark hazel eyes and the half-smile, it was the face of lost love. It was unmarked by grief, by privation, by sickness, by the poisons that surrounded it. It was perfect in every regard.

  The Gage straightened himself, and made himself clinical. He was not now that which had loved. He was not now that which had felt the wild strength of angels in him. Which had burned with the belief that this, this one thing in all the world, was true and wild and immortal. That it would persist. That it would never be betrayed.

  He was not now that thing which had believed in love.

  Now, he was the thing that had avenged it.

  “Hello,” he said, in as level and metallic a voice as he could muster. “I am a Gage.”

  “My name is Khaldi,” the young man said. “Hello, Gage. Be welcome to”—he dropped into Sahali—“the Many-Legged Truth.”

  The Gage assumed that was the name of the city.

  Khaldi continued, “Thank you for consenting to join us. I would like to offer you a tour.”

  “You know what I am?” the Gage asked, only mildly surprised. The accent was wrong, but the language, again, was Messaline. He could have offered thanks that this man—Khaldi, the Master Mechanic (for so he had pieced together the clues)—had rescued him. But it was his experience that no one offered assistance unless they expected to benefit from it in some fashion. So the Gage was just assuming that no thanks would be necessary, because he was going to pay.