“Which we don’t understand the reasons for,” Desct cut in.
“The reasons do not matter,” Kayip said. “What matters is that Verus and Roache are opposed in goal. The removal of Gall, this hidden module, it is all part of their feud, and we now know that Roache has made a move against his foreman. Do you understand?”
Marcel nodded. A wedge between the two.
Celina snorted. “We have wasted enough time on this. While you played engineer, we have been gathering what we can for the clockbombs.” With this, two of the woman’s allies brought forward bags of metal bits and baubles. Sylvaine walked over and started to inspect them. “We never agreed to fight for Huile,” the woman said. “We take down the æthericity lines and attack Lazacorp, that was what we voted for.”
“We didn’t know—”¬ Desct began.
“We can do both,” Sylvaine cut in. “Easier in fact, to do both. Get the sangleum flowing first, and with half the pipebombs we could produce enough energy to demolish the structure, the ætherlines, and most of the building.”
“It’ll turn this shit-stained monolith into an open pit to Inferno,” Desct reiterated.
The engineer nodded, and the murmuring now took on an excited tone. Even Celina made no complaint, her bitter sneer falling back a bit to reveal a hint of excitement.
After this, the meeting descended into the dots of the details. They discussed how many arms they could muster from old tools, what were the best methods to strike, the best time, the best place, and of course, how they were going to sneak in the clockbombs. This, it seemed, would be Marcel’s job. He nodded and promised success, trying to hide his apprehension. He had pushed Verus’s trust as far as he could manage, and he was doubtful he could sneak in so many explosives past guards without raising more than a few eyebrows. Lax as they had been, Marcel suspected it would spark suspicion to be caught installing clockbombs in the machine he was supposed to be studying.
Desct brought the meeting to a close, they had taken as much time as they could afford. In ones and twos they snuck out. Marcel was led by Gileon and several other mutants through underground passageways back to the corner of the crowded sleeping quarters that Verus had tossed him to. Sylvaine followed long enough to re-lock his chains to the same pipework, and then snuck away without a word.
The upcoming sabotage weighed on Marcel more than he could show, as did his weariness. He lay down and tried to temporarily toss the thoughts off. He could figure out something, he told himself. He had gotten this far, he wouldn’t fail now. He just needed sleep and something would come to him.
* * *
Something did come to Marcel, just a few hours later. Specifically the sounds of thumping footsteps, shouts and threats, then two Lazacorp guards, led by Crat, who shoved a gag into Marcel mouth and dragged him away without a word.
To Gearswit!
This is my third application to your shit-suckling Academy, and I will not waste any more time on paperwork and other stiffland idiocy. I have written and rewritten my designs out three times, I know you have read them! I am an engineer, you are an engineer, that should be enough, but the fact that I cannot even speak with you direct and have to resort to scribbling down my complaints…
Enough blather, I will be direct. I do not care about you or your Guild’s feelings towards wastefolk, this is about craft, and my craft is far beyond the pitiful efforts of any of your current students. As I have shown in my designs, (which you have never returned!) there is untapped potential in applying engineering principles directly to the human body. This is obvious enough from those market-sold coglimbs hobbled-together by all sorts of brain-dead engineers, guild or waste-trained. Yet these devices are always extensions, externalized hunks of metal, crafts lacking any imagination. I have read (in books published by your taurshit of a guild) that the human body is infused with mechanical æther, and I have seen the human body called a “machine” in those same books. This is not poetry! Not a metaphor! It is truth! Flesh, bones, organs, blood, mere names for machine-parts of a difference sort. So why then is not æther used directly upon them?
Cowardice! The same reason my applications have been rejected twice! I have shown clear that injections of sangleum products can have effects beyond mutation, that there exists the potential for influencing behavior by use of ætheric engineering on those such injected. Imagine what could be achieved if I were I not stuck in the Wastes, forced to scrap and scavenge, were I to continue my experiments in the workshops of Icaria. Imagine a future where we might control the minds of men in the same manner that we control machines! What foolishness causes you to spurn such power? Your superiors have made their mewling excuses in my previous rejections, “violations of established engineering theory,” “excessive costs,” “complete moral infeasibility.” Bah, nonsense words, fancy ways of writing nothing. You are young, you have a clear eyes, Gearswit. Cut through their stupidity, get me into your Academy. I can promise powers a man would sell his soul for.
Miga Veneficus
—Letter addressed to then-Associate Professor Meir Gearswit. Discarded without response.
Chapter 34
“Ugh,” Marcel said, which seemed to be the only proper, and for that matter only possible, response to having a knee jammed in one’s stomach. He would have buckled over, were his knees not already on the floor and his arms held aloft. Dutrix Crat, who held Marcel’s right arm, now slowly removed his kneecap from his victim’s stomach.
Marcel squinted in the dim of Verus’s office, only a single wisp of sunlight able to sneak through the blinds. The foreman himself leaned on the front of his desk, tearing open envelopes with a knife too long for its role as a sensible letter opener. He glanced through the contents of his mail, and then tossed each letter aside. Verus all but ignored the beating, acknowledging it only by the occasional muttered-out command for the next punch, kick, or stomp.
Every centimetre of Marcel ached, aside from his metal leg, which merely creaked a bit as he wobbled in the brief moment before Crat thrust his elbow into Marcel’s back. Still, the pain was tolerable, but the dread was not. Verus had not offered any explanation for Marcel’s abduction, nor his abuse, and had not given Marcel space to ask.
What had gone wrong? Had Crat uncovered Marcel’s deceit? Had one of the mutants betrayed the cause? Had Verus never bought Marcel’s story in the first place, but had just been stringing him along, using him as bait for the mutants? Marcel wanted to shout to Desct, loud enough, somehow, louder than the dictaphones’ drone, that the mutants had to act now, that they had to strike before Verus did… whatever he was going to do.
The foreman paused to study his prisoner, as the other tattooed guard stomped down on Marcel’s quite real leg. Verus drew small circles in the air with his knife, before landing it gently above the bridge of Marcel’s nose. It appeared double in Marcel’s vision, and he could feel the blade pushing against his skin ever so slightly.
“What are you up to?” Verus asked.
“Nothing!” Marcel said, eyes crossed. “Just doing what you told me, I mean, trying to figure out on your behalf… I’m just trying to survive.”
“Lower back,” Verus whispered, his blade retreating. Marcel felt a knee slam into him at the requested spot, and he groaned.
“What does Roache know?” Verus insisted.
Roache? “I told you everything,” Marcel said, trying not to let his relief show. If Verus was still asking about Roache then perhaps he still didn’t understand Marcel’s true loyalty.
Verus waved the knife back and forth. Marcel couldn’t help but follow its movements with his eyes.
“You spent plenty of hours chitchatting with the man over the years,” Verus said. “What did he tell you? About me?”
“That…” Marcel focused his memory, to add the spice of some vague truths. “You were brutish. A fool. A pain in his arse.”
“And the troll called the mountain rocky,” Verus mused. “Did he tell
you about our work here?”
“Only what he told everyone,” Marcel said.
Verus pulled out a small canister from his pocket with sudden haste, shoving it towards Marcel’s face. An acrid smell assaulted his senses. It reminded Marcel of Roache’s tea, and he recoiled instantly.
“Hmm,” Verus said, closing it. “So the idiot never got you on his leash.”
“Leash?” Marcel said, understanding, but remembering that he shouldn’t.
“Always thought his words were enough, even without the gift.” Verus shook his head, then he waved to his men. “Continue.”
The next minute was filled with pummeling; rapid, hard, a barrage that left Marcel coughing, near the point of vomiting, with the taste of blood in the back of his throat. Then suddenly Verus lunged forward, grabbing Marcel by the scruff of his neck, and shoved the knife right up to the edge of his throat. Marcel sucked in, feeling the sharpness of the blade.
“Tell me everything,” he said. “Speak! Speak!”
“I did,” Marcel said, words suffocated, each syllable pricking. “I told you.”
“He can’t save you.”
Marcel held his breath, each movement stinging against the knife blade.
Verus pulled back some, and then started to speak. He spoke in that strange tongue, that language that didn’t seem to be a language. Dark words that grabbed Marcel by his very veins, striking deeper than his ears. He almost forgot the knife, the fear of the man overwhelming the threat of the mere blade.
“Speak!” Verus said again, suddenly. Marcel felt his gut twist, his false leg burn. The world seemed to fall away, collapsing into darkness under the echo of the words. Terror shook him from his very blood, which rushed through his veins in a mad torrent, his heart beating against his ribcage, threatening to break through. Even Verus seemed to disappear, only the chanting syllables remained.
Marcel struggled to free himself, to thrust his hands against his ears, to grab the blade and cut out his eardrums. He had promised to take the mutants’ secrets to the grave, he had prepared for the beatings, the brutality, for any pain Verus could inflict upon him, but these words spoke to something past pain. It was not mere agony, but a fear that overwhelmed his pitiful body. He knew, though he did not know how he knew, that even the end of his mortality was not enough to escape the horrid sounds, which seemed to echo beyond the bonds of reality. Verus’s mouth was now an abstraction, the words an unending void described sideways. Marcel clutched in at himself, retreated back into a desperate solipsism, to be somewhere, anywhere away from this. He hid from the overwhelming vibrations, curled up to be crushed by the weight of some terror he could not even categorize, seeking refuge in some sliver of himself not yet drowned out, crawling desperately to some corner of memory where he was safe.
Then there was black.
An empty nothing without thought.
* * *
At some point a boot slammed into Marcel’s side. He blinked, eyes wet. The world was a fuzz. No… that was the carpet. The boot hit again. He groaned under the familiar pain, more relieved than anything. The monstrous words had left him, replaced now by:
“Get up, Talwar.”
Marcel pushed himself up from the floor. Verus stood over him, the two guards standing back. How long had he been out? It felt like days, at least hours, but the daylight that snuck through the blinds hadn’t changed its tone.
A fresh panic jumped through him. What had he said? What had he revealed in that confused fever dream?
He heard something behind him. It took him a second to realize that Crat was failing to choke back a laugh.
“Pathetic Talwar, pathetic.” Verus shook his head. “Who is Alba, anyways?”
“I think that was the um, soldier, who led Roache’s whole attack,” offered the second of the guards.
Verus snapped his finger. “Ahh, the swine-headed mercenary bitch. Crying for her?” He scratched at his eye. “You know, I break a lot of people, Talwar, some give up secrets, some beg for mercy. This is a first, laying down and crying for their old captain.”
“What?” Marcel began.
Crat couldn’t hold his laughter in. Verus ignored him.
“A waste,” Verus said. “Just, ‘Alba… Alba… help me…’ took me half a dozen kicks to even knock you out of it.”
So he hadn’t said anything. Marcel hung his head. It seemed Alba had saved him again, in a manner of speaking.
Verus grabbed his hair suddenly, knife blade back.
“It is no surprise. Roach hires cowards,” Verus muttered into his face. “Men he can use. Men who talk easy when their life is on the line.” The foreman studied Marcel. “Perhaps you are unusual. A pitiful wretch, but maybe one who knows it.”
He turned the knife slightly, pressing it against the bottom of Marcel’s chin. His eye locked onto Marcel’s, an unblinking stare, a stare that did not even permit the theoretical possibility of blinking. “I could cut you to pieces, Talwar. Not in the obvious way, I could open you, inspect your every flaw, outline them with my blade, cut them away, bit by bit. I could slice your skin from your flesh, Talwar, I could make you wet and hairless, as before you were born. I could give you the pain you deserve. Do you want that, Talwar? Do you wish it?”
Marcel could only shake his head slightly.
Verus glanced up at his men and sighed. “No, it’s not the moment, is it? Maybe if we were earlier, but now… I don’t have the time.”
The foreman released Marcel, who slumped over. He felt water drip from his face, and realized he had been weeping. Verus tossed the knife on the table and sat there, opening up a file.
“Ok, Mr. Talwar,” he said, in a casual tone. “Why don’t you tell me what you found on my machine?”
Marcel was unable to speak for a full minute. Finally he asked: “What?”
“The... filtration unit. You spent all day on it, you must have found something, or else what am I keeping you around for?”
“Roache…?” Marcel couldn’t help but ask, unable to let the interrogation pass without question.
Verus shrugged. “You don’t seem to be the man’s rat. Didn’t seem so yesterday either, but it couldn’t hurt to check.”
Marcel steadied himself, almost falling. Part of him wanted to laugh. “So you just beat me then for no reason?”
“You walk with too much confidence, Talwar. It’s not my policy to let men work for me unbroken. So come on, let’s see what you discovered.”
So the man had taken his revenge then. All an act to release his rage. Or was it even that? Marcel tried to force his mind back into focus. Was this just the way Verus did things? He glanced back at his guards; neither seemed offended in the least by this waste of time. Maybe this was just Verus’s equivalent of a morning meeting?
“Talwar?” Verus said.
Marcel shook these thoughts away and tried to remember what Sylvaine had told him, what Kayip had advised him to say.
“Well, um,” he said. “I mean, I did discover some oddities.”
* * *
Ysabel held the spiraling torsion spring up in the dim light. “It’s like the scrap we’d find in the dusthomes,” she said.
“Yeah?” Sylvaine said, glancing up from her work. Several clockbombs sat beside her, completed aside from the concentrated canisters of sangleum that would be their explosive cores. It seemed wise to keep the mutagenic explosive material away from the sick and wounded.
Ysabel nodded and handed the spring to Sylvaine who fused it with a quick æther-spark onto the current, half-made, clockbomb beneath her. Ysabel's eyes were wide as she watched Sylvaine work her engineering. The engineer, for her part, put on a show of confidence, which had grown over the past hour from faux bravado to genuine ease. She had never constructed high ordinance before, but the process wasn’t all that different from any other project Sylvaine had taken up in Icaria. Put the pieces in place, focus one’s æthermantics and hope it doesn’t al
l explode.
“Me and my brother would go out when we were kids,” Ysabel explained. “Find what we could in the dusthomes, then walk back with great bags of the stuff.”
“Dusthomes?” Sylvaine asked, while also pointing towards an æther-igniter in the pile of scavenged and stolen machine parks.
“Oh right,” Ysabel said, picking up the small metal cylinder. “You know, the giant houses out in the Wastes. I guess they must have been mansions or something a century ago. Hard to see why anyone would need that much space. Now just dust lives there.”
“You would go as kids?” Sylvaine asked, eyes down on her project. The small talk was strange, but pleasant. Since leaving Icaria she had had little light conversation, Kayip’s closest equivalent had been his long, meandering sermons from the Chronicles of the Ascended.
“Yeah, my brother took me along since I was six. Father had to tend to the taur herd, or would be gone, chasing away raiders.”
“It wasn’t dangerous going off by yourself?” Sylvaine asked
“Oh no!” Ysabel shook her head. “I mean, we found a few troglyns and some wastehounds, but I shot them good.”
Sylvaine paused her work to look at the woman. “You shot them? I thought you were six.”
“Of course,” Ysabel said, with perfect earnestness. “You can't let a six-year-old wander off on her own without a rifle.”
Sylvaine just laughed and went back to work. “I guess city-life is different after all.”
“I’ve never been to a stiffland city.” Ysabel sorted the pieces around her. “Except for this one, I guess.”
“Not the best first impression,” Sylvaine said.
“No, I suppose not.”
“You girls almost done with the bombs?” Gualter shouted, as he sloppily wiped off the oozing sores from one of the groaning mutants on the floor. Sylvaine shot him a glare, and he muttered something vaguely offensive and turned away.
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