“You’ve spoken more sense in the last couple seconds, Talwar, than in the past couple years.” Verus waved a finger. “But what we’re doing here, it’s not for some petty revenge. Oh, they’ll get their due in time, the lot of them, but they also have their role to play, for now. Unlike all you rats, we,” and Verus pointed to his quiet, tattooed guards as well, “work for a greater good. The only good.”
Marcel looked up, a mask of genuine interest covering his disgusted curiosity. The foreman clearly had strange pretensions, though to what exactly, Marcel couldn’t guess.
Verus crossed his arms. “But it doesn’t matter if you work for Roache or not. I don’t need you. Crat you can take him—”
“And that greater good,” Marcel said, trying to think of any excuse to keep the conversation going as Crat turned and grabbed him, “it involves poisoning all of Huile?”
Verus froze a moment, then gestured for the man to let go. “Not poisoning, exactly. No, quite the opposite, but it may seem… unpleasant. We’re simply preparing people for their proper service. Some serve in life, many more through death, even your damned Confederacy knows that. But yes, we’re turning Huile into an abattoir of sorts.” He stopped and at scratched at his eyepatch. “You knew that, and still you came in to help me.”
“Like I said,” Marcel spoke with a manufactured calm. “They’re all worms. If you poison them, slaughter them, why should I care, it is better than they deserve.”
“And how did you discover I would do that?”
This, Marcel had not prepared an answer for. “I…” he started. “Well, from the notes.”
“You can read these?” This seemed the most surprising development for Verus.
“What did you think I went to university for?” Marcel said, hoping Roache hadn’t spoken to Verus on that subject.
“It’s not something I considered worth my attention,” Verus admitted.
“Engineering,” Marcel explained. “Well, the practical sort, just mechanics really. Didn’t have the Knack. Was near a genius at it, but didn’t see the point of being some corner-store gadgeteer,” Marcel pointed towards the notes. “You’re infusing something, something with sangleum, into the water, but you’re having some issues.”
Verus nodded. “I guess that’s the long and short of it, at least of what’s in here. There were some… modifications Roache’s arse-licking workers made, to what was supposed to be a collaborative enterprise.”
“Let me have a look at it,” said Marcel. “Just give me a few of your mutants as assistants, let me see what I can find.”
Verus squinted down at Marcel, his gaze attempting to drill past the façade that Marcel held together with all his will.
The vocaphone rang suddenly, breaking the exhausting examination. Verus picked up the end.
“Eh?” he said. “Right.” A pause. “Idiot.” Another. “So damned impatient, it was his own problem. Well, tell Roache the truegods have smiled on him. Found the taur arse’s body in the Underway. Moron tripped one of mutant traps, brains splattered across the floor. Eh? Yeah, the two cops as well, rat food.” Verus rolled his eye as he listened. “Lambert can get better police next time, I don’t care. Listen, I have things in order, as always. So stop bothering me and keep your damn eye on the gilded griffon-shit, Watcher, that is your duty.”
Marcel released a long-held breath, as he listened to Verus, who nodded along to some mumbling echo on the other side of the earpiece. What in Inferno the man meant by “truegods,” he wasn’t sure, maybe Kayip’s accusations had some twisted basis, but it seemed his execution had been delayed. His confidence started to return. He might not have a talent for manipulating machinery or a strong sword-arm, but he could talk his way out from the brink of death.
This brief self-assurance faded as Verus started to mutter some words into the vocaphone in a strange tongue. It was no language Marcel had heard, something deep and unsettling, its tone unlike any human speech. It did not even resemble animal grunts. The words reminded him of the chants of priests, and the grinding of metal, but also something more, something deeper, like the sounds of a rolling storm. They struck him suddenly and overwhelmed him. Each syllable was alien, and yet, he had the strangest sense that if he just listened closer he could understand their meaning, but every instinct screamed for him to close his ears. His heart pounded, he was terrified, though he didn’t understand why. A panic grew in him greater than the real and exact fear of death he had just been hiding from, a strange terror that eclipsed Verus’s threats, or even Marcel’s own fear of failing Desct, of failing Huile. It was a deep overwhelming horror at the implacable sounds coming from Verus’s mouth, as if their secret meaning held implications worse even than his own annihilation.
Then Verus slammed the vocaphone receiver down, and the fear was instantly gone. Marcel struggled to recover, to breathe, and his existential terror was replaced by the more standard fear for his survival.
Verus chuckled, watching him. “You really are pitiful. Think you have even a shit-shard’s sense of what’s going on.” He walked over, the guards stepping back as Verus lifted the man up, patting down his coat, his grin a hair’s length from his prisoner’s face. “Very well, Talwar, you want to work? We’ll put you to work.”
Chapter 30
Engineering was the art of planning, of melding intricate thought with brilliant inspiration and putting the result to paper, then putting that paper to metal. The material of the machine, even the æther that gave it life, was secondary to the true medium of engineering: the well-organized mind. Even the greatest skill with the ætherglove was useless, if one could only plan out the haphazard and chaotic.
Sylvaine didn’t know what to call Marcel’s “art.” “Private investigating” as she understood it (which was mostly from pulps, admittedly) was supposedly an art of careful consideration, but Marcel seemed to lack that completely. Perhaps the man practiced “advanced stupidity,” the art of the charismatic and suicidal. Worse still, Kayip had supported the man’s plan, given him advice over the rationally-derived insults Sylvaine had thrown. The Church might have revered the martyrs, but Sylvaine thought that was no reason for Kayip to be exporting martyrdom.
Fine, Marcel’s life was his own. If he wanted to throw it away, who was she to stop him? He had the need to be at the center of everything, it seemed, and if that meant getting himself killed, why should it matter to her? It would have been better if she had never bothered to try to save the man in the first place, then Sylvaine might have had the time to nap. She damn well needed one.
These were the thoughts Sylvaine used to distract herself as she frantically scrawled out a copy of Gall’s notes, eyelids dripping, head fuming. It felt easier to fill her mind with anger than fear.
After Marcel left, and Sylvaine stared into the dripping, echoing, dark, she asked Kayip. “He’ll be okay, right?”
“Certainly possible.” The man nodded, lifting up his bag. “Yes, I think he may live, there is a chance.”
Sylvaine rubbed her eyes and forehead hair into her palm. The monk cared not for physical comfort, nor, apparently, emotional comfort.
“Let’s just get moving,” she said.
It didn’t matter if she was concerned about the fate of the idiot, they simply didn’t have time to waste worrying. The notes were to be delivered to Desct sometime before sunrise, and Kayip’s rusting watch ticked forward relentlessly.
The monk led her deeper through Huile’s Underway, past the underrail station into a subterranean Infernoscape of booby traps and corpses. Kayip had warned her of what she might see, but the sight of the rotting bodies still unsettled her.
As they walked Sylvaine put her glove to any metal outcropping she could find, feeling for anything dangerous. She sensed a jury-rigged shotgun and raised her hand to disarm it with ætheric ease, when Kayip grabbed her shoulder.
“It is best we just avoid them,” he said. “Lazacorp men may notice the change.”
; The paths the man led her down were convoluted, but they made steady progress. Sylvaine still found herself surprised by the monk’s agility, his proficiency in the arts of leaping and scrambling. Their travel progressed quickly; it was almost relaxing in its own way. The smell of the place was still horrendous but, walking among the piping and the old forgotten machinery, it reminded her a tad of Icaria, of crowded workshop basements. She felt calmed, until she started to hear a voice. It was soft, distant, a scratchy recording, but one that was familiar.
“Return to your workstation,” it said, in a tone, which despite its almost bored banality, had a force that cut into her ears. “Return to Blackwood Row. Return to your workstation. Return to Blackwood Row.”
Her breathing picked up, she felt her veins run fast, hot, burning. It was Roache’s voice. Roache’s commands.
“Sylvaine,” Kayip whispered.
Sweated oozed from her, her vision turned to fuzz, the smells of rot danced between overwhelming and nonexistent. The words dug past her ears, digging into her mind. Their force wasn’t as overwhelming as they had been a month ago, but the repetition cut into her with each word. Return… return… return…
Kayip moved to touch her. She turned, stifled a scream, or perhaps a growl, and ran.
“Sylvaine!” the man hissed, and dashed after her.
She stumbled up staircases and down flooded hallways, leaping over collapsed machinery and pushing through holes in the walls. The world blurred around her, and she could feel Lazarus’s presence, commanding her, mocking her. She heard the shouts of Kayip in some far-off world, heard the snap of a tripwire, heard the blast, felt the warmth of shotgun pellets flying mere centimetres from her skin, calibrated for slower prey.
Walls of wire blocked her, but with a shout and a spark they melted into nothing, steaming air to be pushed aside in her flight. Or her pursuit. She wasn’t sure; she couldn’t tell if she was running away from Roache, or to rip out his throat.
Then suddenly, she was there. The voice was not some distant echo, but the aural secretion of a dictaphone hanging on the ceiling above. She did not wait to think. With a spark she flung it from the wall, onto the ground, where it smoldered in a melted pile.
The voice was gone. Roache had been slain. Her breathing slowed, the world came into focus. For a brief, beautiful second she had won.
Then she heard it again. Distant, quiet echoes. “Return to your workstation...” And then another voice, the same recording but from a different angle, “Return to Blackwood Row…”
She pushed her ears in on themselves and sucked in to stave off the panic. It’s not him, it’s just a recording. I’m not on slickdust, I don’t have to listen to his voice. Yet the commands kept droning, her blood kept boiling. Sylvaine's breath quickened, she was panting, close to hyperventilating; her mind dimmed, her instincts roared.
No! She couldn’t let herself lose control, let herself scream and run, or to go berserk in a wild rage. To lose her mind in a bestial fervor was no better than losing her will to Roache. Rationality must be her escape, to flee into her mind, not away from it.
Of course there’d be multiple dictaphones, she reasoned, fail-safes, a wall to keep the mutants in. It was just a system of machines, designed for a logical, if vile, purpose. A psychological barrier instead of a physical one, but nothing more.
Sylvaine started to walk forward, wandering directionless, her eyes open but ears as shut as she could manage, humming to herself to distract her attention from the needling pressure of Roache’s voice.
She tried to think through Lazacorp's planning, calculate the exact measurements one would make in order to make an ideal wall of sound, the methods needed to estimate the range of the echo, the amount of insulated wiring required for such a project. These were pointless thoughts, purposeless math, but it kept her mind busy as she moved. She couldn’t manage anything more.
* * *
By the time Kayip caught up with Sylvaine, she had wandered far past the echoes, to a distant corner basement, where she sat slumped. The man came and sat beside her.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
Kayip put his hand on hers. “It is my folly,” he said. “I did not think of their effect. It is my fault.”
Sylvaine pulled in her knees. She was drenched in sweat, her fur matted to her arms. “I can’t go back through it. Maybe it’s not as strong for me as the mutants… but I can’t try to cross that barrier again.” She paused. How could she explain her fear? It wasn’t just Roache, it was something inside of her. Something primitive and animalistic, something more powerful than the voice. To be a machine to another person’s will was horrifying, but temporary. To become a beast would prove true every word of loathing and disgust that had ever been lobbed at her.
“It’s too much,” she said finally. “I’ll help how I can from Huile, but you’ll have to make the trip to Blackwood Row on your own.”
Kayip stared down the darkened corridors. “You must have lost yourself in that maze,” he said. “We have already crossed over.”
She closed her eyes and breathed in. Yes, she could smell the air from above, dimly. Somehow it smelled even more wretched than down here.
* * *
Despite Sylvaine’s panic, the two still made it into the bowels of Blackwood Row before sunrise. Kayip searched out a timid mutant there, whom he called Gileon. This guide led them through the dark streets and dense shanties, down in the basement of some half-abandoned pumping facility, where they were able to make the tail end of a meeting hidden inside an extraneous water tank.
The mutants inside greeted Sylvaine and Kayip with hushed cheers, their initial nervous bewilderment at the intruders turning to complete exhilaration at the sight of the schematics, even second-hand copies as they were. The mutants all smelled, to a person, terrible, but their warm welcome and soft exuberance seemed to deafen the odors, in some sort of reverse synesthesia. The only exceptions to these friendly greetings were the cold welcomes of a woman in the back named Celina, as well as the equally terse grunts of several other mutants that seemed to huddle around her. They scoffed at Sylvaine’s appearance, questioned the veracity of her notes (to no success), and seemed keen on insulting Desct whenever possible.
Desct, on the other hand, was the most outgoing of the bunch, and whenever Sylvaine’s voice faltered, whether due to nerves or just exhaustion, he would step in. He congratulated the engineer, praised her swift hands and clear eyes, he argued for the need of careful sabotage, and uplifted his audience’s spirits with promises of imminent emancipation.
“So we wait even longer then?” Celina snapped.
“A few days. After all the indignities we have suffered, do we not have the damned fortitude to make proper preparations for our emancipation?” Desct barked back. Most of the group nodded, even those who had seemed wary of Sylvaine’s presence were won over by Desct’s determined confidence.
He explained his plan simply: they would use clockbombs, set at exact points that Sylvaine would calculate, to force a blackout of Blackwood Row, and during this temporary silence of Roache’s booming voice, attack. Celina questioned the specifics, and though Desct admitted some details needed to be hashed out later, he did not have to argue long before it was clear the general mood favored his plan. Before daylight could sneak over the walls of Blackwood Row, this plan was ratified in a quick vote. It was near unanimous, and though Celina and her gang muttered some vague misgivings, they simply abstained, offering no real opposition.
* * *
Desct led Sylvaine and Kayip out, as the rest of the mutant council swiftly ran back to their hovels or early morning workstations. The monk planned to retreat into the Underway, to return at the next nightfall for further planning. As for Sylvaine…
“I can’t make it back,” she said.
The mutant leader nodded. “We can find habitation for you, if you don’t mind a little squeeze and perhaps a whiff of foul odor.”
Sylvaine did mind, but since there was no alternative to the poor conditions that were the height of the Blackwood Row hospitality, she agreed without voicing any explicit complaints. Kayip bent down to her, as they approached the opening of the Underway.
“You will be well?” he asked.
She nodded, with the modicum of confidence she could rally. The monk raised his arm, haltingly, and then slowly embraced her. She was shocked still a moment, but then put her arm around him. It felt strange… but comforting. Despite the unusual circumstances in which they had met, and the beyond unusual circumstances they now found themselves in, Kayip had become something like a friend. Sylvaine wasn’t sure she had ever had a real friend.
“You will be well,” the monk agreed. As he released her and started to descend he nodded to Desct. “And I will return, with food and any other supplies I can manage.”
“Good idea,” Desct replied, then, turning to Sylvaine: “You don’t wish to share the shit nourishment we must suffer.”
Kayip disappeared beneath the street, and Desct led Sylvaine, alone, into the mass of shantytowns that covered the space between two large refinery structures.
“This was once some sort of courtyard, I think, when the refineries were first opened,” he explained. “They had sufficient lodging for the population of mutants years ago, but from what I can gather, their shit-cursed operations expanded, and it was cheaper just to throw us to the trash heap, and let us build our own fucking quarters ourselves.”
The structures were webs of welded pipes and iron poles, upon which were placed dirty cloth and cheap wood. Some buildings were old machines: tread-driller arms reused as support pillars, decayed hulls of transport-trucks converted into cramped huts, melted scrap from a thousand origins used to fill in corners. The macrostructure was large, rust and filth covered, but more than anything else, it was dense. Travel through its winding paths seemed more plodding than even the worst of the Underway, requiring even more climbing, crawling, and sneaking through hidden passageways; some between walls of rags, others behind non-load-bearing “walls.” Sylvaine tried to imagine what architectural plans for such a structure would be, but concluded that it would be madness to try to sketch it out.
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