Heart of Veridon

by Tim Akers

  “Yeah,” I said. “I’m not sure… not sure she’s going to make it.”

  “People die,” the girl said, flatly.

  “Yeah,” I said. I looked down at Emily’s still face, the soft lines of her lips, so pale and so quiet. “Sometimes.”

  There was a wooden chair nearby, its legs splintered by the cold. I set Emily carefully down and turned back to the girl.

  “Would you have this one stay?” she asked. “Or is her passing acceptable to you?”

  “Acceptable? No, not really.”

  The girl twitched, the wisps of her wings rising and falling. “There is a pipe. That one. Take it in your hand.”

  “What?” I asked. She indicated a pipe near my head, maybe an inch thick. I wrapped my fingers around it. The metal was briefly cold, then seemed to melt in my hand. Slick gray liquid began to leak out from around my grip. The drops sizzled when they hit the floor.

  “She is dying,” the girl said. “You should hurry.”

  “What is it?”

  “The tithe of my servants. It keeps me here, living, available. Put it against the wound.”

  The pipe came free in my hand, slippery and flexible as rubber. A gout of metal splashed across the floor. The scattered pool resolved into tiny snowflake-sized cogs, clattering over the frost like spilled coins. I pulled the loose bandages off Emily’s chest and pushed the pipe against the bullet hole.

  “What will this—”

  Emily gasped; her eyes open wide and full of fear. She breathed in, struggling, her hands clawing against the old wood of the chair. She looked at me and I flinched back. She tried to scream and burbled instead. Viscous gray liquid bubbled out of her throat and ran like syrup over her teeth and down her chin. Frantically, I pulled at the pipe but it wouldn’t budge. It felt hooked to her ribs. When it tore free a thin line of sandy metal streamed out and then stopped, resting against her chest. Emily spasmed and fell to the floor.

  “What the fuck did you do?” I shouted.

  “Unkilled her, child. She’ll be fine.”

  I pulled Emily up off the ground. Her skin and clothes stuck to the icy floor. The liquid that boiled out of her mouth had hardened into a scab of clockwork pieces that tore free and clattered to the ground. She was stiff, but I set her on the chair and shook her. She was breathing, but unconscious. Her teeth were lined in pewter and blood.

  “What’s wrong with her?” I whirled on the cage and wished I had my sad little pistol. “What the fuck’s wrong with her!”

  “The foetus is setting.” She sighed and slumped against the bars of her cage. “So excitable, people. This one is not going to die today. Is that acceptable?”

  “I… I suppose.” I looked back at Emily. She was breathing. “Better than I could do for her.”

  The girl was quiet. I stepped closer to her.

  “Are you…” I started. I didn’t know how to talk to a myth. “How did you come to be here?”

  “Has the world forgotten me, then? Different days. I was a miracle once. A goddess, tightly held.”

  “So you’re Camilla. You’re really her.”

  “A man gave me that name, once. The only man I trusted, honestly.” She shifted in her bonds, the flexible piping grinding together like stones. “I had another name. I think that part of me must have been taken.” She looked down, her eyes unfocused, like a child trying to recall her sums. “Yes, it must have been taken away. I don’t forget things.”

  I sat back on my heels. My mind was whirling, a slippery storm brewing between Emily’s injuries and the shock of meeting the closest thing Veridon had to actual divinity.

  “You have the codex within, yes? I can taste it, on your blood.”

  “What do you mean, codex?”

  “Your engine. You are one of those children, the bleeders. The ones who fly, in their awkward way. They bring them to me, sometimes, when they are to die. So that the spirit in their blood does not go to waste.” She stretched closer, the frailty of her ribs straining against their bonds. Her eyes were warm and light. “Is that why you are here, Pilot child? Are you about to die, to feed me?”

  “That wasn’t my plan, no.”

  “Ah.” She settled back. “Well, then. Did you come that I might save the girl?”

  “That wasn’t my plan either. But I thank you for that.”

  “Of course.”

  “That was foetal metal. Pure,” I said. I nudged the handful of fresh cogs with my toe. “It could have killed her.”

  “Perhaps.” She shrugged, and the wisps of her ravaged wings twitched. “I didn’t think it likely.”

  “Well. I’d have liked to know her life was in danger.”

  “Her life is in danger,” she said. “Yours as well.”

  “What?”

  “Being here, talking to me. The Wrights will want you both dead.”

  “Well, yeah. That doesn’t surprise me. Why are they keeping you here?”

  She wasn’t looking at me anymore. Her eyes were focused at a distance greater than that allowed by the room. When she didn’t answer I tried a more direct question.

  “At the top of this pillar, high in the Church above.” I nodded to the whirring spindle that emerged from her back, jointed to give her some range of movement. “There is a peculiar Cog. What is it?”

  She looked at me as though she had only just noticed I was there. Something was moving behind her eyes; comprehension, or horror. She kept her voice even.

  “What business is it of yours? What have you come here to do?”

  “Like I said. I’m here by accident. I came through… I came from up above.” As horrific as her situation seemed to be, she had called the Wrights her servants. And they were keeping her alive. I didn’t want to anger her with their deaths, until I knew her position in all this.

  “No one is here by accident. There are always patterns to this life, codex. Whether we see them or not depends on our eyes. And my eyes tell me things that make your presence very non-accidental.”

  I backed away from the cage, laying my hand on my belt. The holster was empty, of course. “What things?”

  She leaned closer to me, until the fragments of her porcelain-perfect face were inches from the steaming bars of the coolant cage. There was hunger in her voice.

  “It has been a long while, here in this place. I have a wide eye, but it is weak, like peering through fog. These people, these Wrights crawl through my bones, they siphon off my blood and feed it back to me, they scry the dissected bits of my soul and look for some star-damned mystery in the spatter of my gore. What do I see, you ask! What do I sense! I taste the blood of the Wrights, near my heart. I hear the scurrying of the Elder’s servants across my skin, as yet unaware of your location. Unaware because I have not told them, unaware because I will it to be so.” She shuddered with a long, terrible sigh. “So, child. Let us begin again. I sense something about you, and you are asking very difficult questions. Why are you here? What do you know about that peculiar Cog, as you say?”

  I saw no reason to not believe her. If she said she could warn the Wrights, I wanted to avoid that.

  “I have seen another, here in the city.”

  “Another?” She sat up, leaning closer to me with unnatural energy. “There is another heart in the city.”

  “I have held it in my hands. I know where it is.”

  “And its owner?” she asked. Her eyes were scared and hopeful, all at once. “What of the owner?”

  “He is in the city as well. Killing people; chasing me.”

  Her face fluttered between shock and rage.

  “It is an ugly thing you have done, Pilot. You people… you take everything we give you and make such a mockery of it.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “This!” she yelled, twitching in her cage, “This place, the heart! Gods, that you would follow the path laid out and at its end return to me with such a foul offering.” She tensed, her fingers curled into claws, her hair slowly rising
until it swirled and snapped in whipcord tension. “You are a people of filth and discord. This place should be wiped clean. Gods, that I had the power.”

  I paused. It was the first time I’d heard a deity swearing in the name of other gods.

  “Let’s try this again, lady. I think I know what that Cog is, the heart you keep talking about. And I’m not the one who fetched it. I’m just the unlucky fuck who ended up with it, and all the damn trouble that follows. I’m just trying to get out of this thing without getting killed.”

  She looked at me incredulously, then set her mouth in a grim line. “You asked about the pillar, and the Cog at its tip.”

  “I did.”

  “And you have held a similar Cog in your hand. Yet you do not know what it is, for certain.” She settled back, closed her eyes. “A messenger, then. Sent only to deliver a message. But is it a threat, or a misbegotten offering.” She seemed to be musing to herself. Her eyes open, full of calculation. “Who sent you to me?”

  “No one. I’m here on my own.” I considered for a second if I was being manipulated, if events had been planned to get me down here, in this chamber. Things were unfolding faster than I could think about them. “This thing fell into my hands, under difficult circumstances. And, frankly, circumstances have done nothing but gotten more difficult every damn day since.”

  “Fell into your hands?” She stared at me in disbelief. “Like stars fall out of the sky! This is a place of madness. What is it you want to know? I will tell you. The cog on the pillar, high above, the one whose cycle runs this seething cancer on your city? That is my heart. Plucked from my chest and put on display, that these fumbling idiots may learn a truth that was not meant for them. It is my heart, the heart of cursed Veridon.”

  “Your heart?” I asked. “But you’re still alive.”

  “It is a careful balance. What they can take, how far they can reduce me without losing me entirely. They’ve managed so far.”

  “It hurts?”

  “Something like pain, yes. Something more intimate than pain.” She leaned away from me, her rage flickering as she thought back. “Some parts of me die, when they take them. Some live, either in their chapels or implanted in surrogates. Their echoes crowd the city, like lost children drowning.” She shuddered. “The sound of it is too much, sometimes.”

  “Why are they doing this?”

  She laughed, a clattering sound like an engine flying apart. I was amazed she was able to talk at all, lacking as she did a true mouth and lungs.

  “They fed the city on the secrets of my bones. The cogwork, the zepliners, your PilotEngine… all derived from the hidden patterns of my body. Pale reflections of the master pattern, of course, but—”

  “That’s impossible. The Church has been passing out the benefits of the Algorithm for generations. Over a hundred years.”

  “One hundred twenty-six,” she sighed. “They have been very thorough in their ministrations.”

  I would have sat down, but I was worried about sticking to the frost cold floor. I put a hand on Emily’s chair and looked down at her. She wasn’t going to believe me, when I told her who we had met. I wish she was awake for this. I didn’t trust myself to ask the right questions.

  “And the other Cog, the one that I was given?”

  “We can’t live without some connection to our heart.” She looked down, crestfallen. “I’m afraid that, by sending them the map, I may have killed one of my brothers. It was not what I intended.”

  “The map?” I asked. “You gave them a map?”

  “The Council, yes. I don’t know if they realized who they were negotiating with. I have agents, here in the Church, and in the river, among the Fehn. I hoped they would catch the attention of one of my people, perhaps summon a rescue party.”

  “Oh,” I said, “I think that may have happened. I think one of your people might be wandering the city right now.”

  She straightened up.

  “Bring him here, Pilot. Or tell him how to get here. Do it quickly, before they capture him. I would not consign another to my fate, and feed Veridon a new pattern.”

  “He keeps trying to kill me, and take that Cog. Everyone seems to want those two things. Me, and that Cog.”

  “You flatter yourself. The Cog is all that matters.”

  “Yeah, well,” I shrugged. “You said that an Angel can’t live without their heart?”

  “Angel. Such childish mythology. Yes, the… Cog, it gives us our pattern. Without it we’re just the metal.” She nodded at the pipe feeding foetal metal into her system. “We can’t hold together.”

  “Then I think your friend’s already screwed. He’s fallen apart at least once, I saw it. I did it. He just melted into little cogs and left someone else’s body behind.”

  “One of your friends, probably? A Pilot or some such?”

  “An engram singer, but you have the idea. Someone who’s been cogged.”

  “He’s seeking patterns, trying to recover his heart before he dissolves completely.” She brushed her cheek with one fragmented hand. “Not much time. You must take that Cog to him, and then bring him here.”

  “And if I do?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “What will happen to this building, this Church?” I crossed my arms. “What will happen to the city?”

  “Does that concern you? You didn’t seem too concerned about the well-being of the Church when you broke in.”

  I shrugged. “This is my city. The Church and its devices are the core of Veridon’s power. I don’t have to like that, but it’s plain truth.”

  “You don’t look like someone who shares in that power, despite your enhancements. You look like a thief.” She leaned close to the bars. “You even smell like a…” her voice faltered. “Thief. You said my brother still pursues you, even without his heart. How long has it been?”

  “I don’t know. Weeks. Maybe months.”

  Her sad face cracked into a grin. “You have seen both Cogs, yes. Mine, and the one stolen from my brother. How would you say they compare?”

  “The one upstairs, your heart. It looks different. Simpler.”

  “No offense taken.” She smiled like a broken bottle. “I was a messenger. Like you; sent by other hands. We had been sending material down the river for eons; long after the sleep cycles started, we continued. It was realized that, recently, the missives were not getting through. I was sent to find out why.”

  “And the other heart?” I asked.

  “It is the heart of a destroyer. It has great potential.”

  “Big trouble, I take it.”

  “Trouble that you can still avoid. Go back to whoever sent you and beg them. Beg with your life, Pilot. Tell them to bring me that Cog, and I will leave. And I will take my brother with me.”

  “You would just go?”

  She shrugged. “In my way, in my time. But yes, I would go.”

  “And you were a messenger?” I asked.

  “Yes, sent to find the gap in the system. The failure in the river.”

  “Sent? By whom?” I found it strange to be hearing about the true origin of the Church’s vessels. That their religion was based on misplaced baggage seemed appropriate.

  “Ancient machines. Deep places. Your churchmen, these Wrights, they were taking the vessels from the river and making things with them. That cursed Algorithm of theirs.”

  “And you told them to stop?”

  “They wouldn’t,” Her face fell. “I underestimated their… fervor, I suppose.”

  “When you didn’t return to the deep engines, no one wondered where you were?”

  “We move in very long cycles,” She sighed. “And most of us are off the line. It will be a while before I am missed.”

  “So you sent a message, somehow, to the Council. Directed them downriver in the hope they would kick over a wasp tower and your friends would track them back upriver and rescue you.” I leaned closer to her. The air around her smelled like burnt oil. “You
meant to destroy the city.”

  She looked up, her eyes following the lines of the cage, the webwork of pipes and the pillar growing out of her spine, then looked down at the dissected ruin of her body.

  “Can you blame me?”

  “Yes. Not in principle, I suppose, but in practice. This is where I live, see, and where I’ll probably die. But I’d rather it not happen like that.” I paced around the cage, looking over her limp form suspended from the pipes. “No matter what these people have done to you, that doesn’t mean the whole city deserves to die. Hardly any of them know you exist. I certainly didn’t.”

  “And if they did? Do you really think they would clamor for my release? Give up their cogwork and their airships, the power those things bring to the city? Would you?”

  “Give up my cogwork? In a damn second. It’s been nothing but trouble.” I laughed. “Ruined my whole life.”

  “So. You have it in your power to do that, right now. Help me. Release me.”

  “I’ve got my own trouble, ma’am. I just want out from under this thing. I don’t want to add your little crusade of destruction to my list. Your psycho friend can find you on his own, or he can fall apart and die in a gutter. Not my problem.”

  “Ah, but you don’t need him. His loss is tragic, of course.” Her eyes were manic. “But I am weak only because my heart is so far away.”

  “So you’re saying I could bring you the other Cog and you’d just be able to walk away.”

  She nodded, her hands tingling with nervous energy. “With that heart, an Avenger’s heart, and all this metal. I could walk out.”

  “They would try to stop you.”

  “Yes.” Her eyes glittered like knife points. “They would try.”

  “And you would kill them. And then? You would wreak your vengeance on Veridon. Am I right?”

  “No, no, of course. Well. You could be there to steady my hand. Guide me. Certainly there are elements of this city that need purging, yes?”

  “You would kill the people I asked, root out the institutions I demand.” I nodded my head. “And if you get overexcited, if you started to rampage.”

  “You could stop me,” her voice was smooth, her hands together in prayer. “Guide me.”