The Wonder Engine_Book Two of the Clocktaur War

by T. Kingfisher

  The grave-gnoles were taking the corpse into the Clockwork District. Slate closed her eyes and listened intently—was that the sound of the gate being opened?

  They’re taking the bodies into the factory there. Nobody’s paying attention, because they’re grave-gnoles and people don’t look at them.

  They look at the other gnoles and don’t see them. They see the grave-gnoles so they don’t look at them.

  This was troubling, as much for what it said about humans as about the fact that corpses were regularly being dragged into the Clockwork District and no one was paying attention.

  Slate chewed on her thumbnail and then Brenner popped up next to her and she let out a squawk.

  “Didn’t you just promise not to go out without an escort?”

  “I didn’t go out. I went up.”

  “I’m sure that’ll be a consolation when you’re dead.”

  “Shut up, Brenner.”

  “I will not. For once, the paladin and I agree on something.” He dropped to his heels next to her and began rolling a cigarette. “Well, anyway, what’d you find?”

  “Not sure yet. Something, maybe. Let’s go back to the inn.”

  “What’ll you give me not to tell the paladin you’re wandering around unsupervised?”

  “I won’t push you off the roof.”

  “Aww.”

  “He’s not in charge here.”

  “Really? After all that time in your room last night…”

  Oh, so that’s what this is about. Slate stifled a sigh.

  “Tell me, darlin’, is he calling his god’s name or yours when he—“

  “Brenner.”

  The assassin grinned like a shark.

  Slate groaned. “He was confessing his sins, if you must know.”

  “For paladins, that’s practically foreplay.”

  Slate didn’t want to laugh, but she did anyway, and immediately felt unkind. Brenner looked more smug than usual.

  They made their way back across the rooftops. Slate glanced over her shoulder in the direction of the Clockwork District several times.

  What’s going on in there? What could they possibly be doing?

  Brenner started to say something and Slate held up a hand. He dipped his head in acknowledgement. They proceeded along the roofline in silence, while Slate’s mind added things up like a column of figures and came out with results that didn’t seem remotely possible.

  It can’t be all the bodies. People want to bury their dead…if they can afford it...

  In a city this size, there are lots of people who can’t afford it. And the grave-gnoles just take the bodies away, no questions asked…Have they taken the place of the pauper’s grave?

  What about murder victims, though? What does the Watch think of the grave-gnoles, I wonder? Are they glad they’re taking away bodies or…?

  Slate shook her head. That was one group she wasn’t going to get to ask.

  I suppose we could send Caliban over in full regalia…no, I’d rather not come to their attention at all, if we can avoid it. You don’t forget Mister Knight-Champion in a hurry, and not when he’s asking weird questions about where the dead bodies go.

  Still, suppose the gnolls have pushed out the men with the body carts. Wouldn’t those people kick up a fuss?

  Brenner started to saying something and Slate held up a hand. “Thinking,” she said. He nodded.

  What if the corpsetakers did kick up a fuss? They’re the lowest of the low. They make their living looting the dead and selling the bodies to the resurrection men. The Watch and the Senate both would probably be ecstatic to see them replaced by small, polite creatures that don’t talk to humans much.

  They reached the square with the inn and dropped down into an alley.

  On the house that the grave-gnoles had entered, there was a sign. It was boldly stylized—a black circle with a droplet inside, like blood.

  Now isn’t that interesting…

  “Go in without me,” said Slate. She glanced over her shoulder at the notice. “I want to talk to the innkeeper.”

  “And get the paladin all up in arms? I’ll wait.”

  Slate gritted her teeth. “Fine…”

  She went into the inn by the front door, while Brenner lounged against the fountain outside, flicking bits of ash into the water.

  The innkeeper looked up. “Can I help you, miss?”

  “Excuse me…” said Slate. “There’s an odd sign on a building across the way—a black circle with a red drop in the middle—”

  “Werkblight,” said the innkeeper. “Three-day quarantine.”

  “Only three days?” asked Slate, surprised. Blight was treated much more harshly in the capitol.

  “You want it to run longer? Three days is plenty,” said the innkeeper. “If you’ve got it, you’ll likely die in half a day or so, and if you aren’t going to get it there’s no sense sitting around with a pile of corpses. It used to be a week, but you’d get people running out of food and water and coming out. Didn’t seem to matter much.”

  “Do they know what causes it?” asked Slate.

  The other woman shrugged. “People say the gnoles carry it, but there’s people who work with ’em every day and never get it—and merchants who walk through the gates and fall down dead with it two hours later. Me, I think it’s a curse of the gods for our impure living.”

  “And the grave-gnoles take them away?” asked Slate, who could see a conversational pit looming before her and was hoping to avoid it.

  “Yep. They don’t let people touch ’em. Graveyards won’t take werkblight corpses. The gnoles take ’em off somewhere, dump ’em in a pit or something. Burn ’em, maybe.”

  “You don’t know?”

  The woman gave her a defensive look. “Not my job. I’m sure the city pays the little blighters to take care of it proper.”

  Slate thanked the woman and fled to the relative haven of their rooms.

  Caliban pulled the door open. The paladin looked distracted. He didn’t even say anything about the fact that Brenner had come in five minutes before she did.

  “What’s happening?” asked Slate. The line between his eyes was worrying her.

  He ran a hand over his face. “Learned Edmund has discovered something.”

  Slate glanced past him, to where the scholar was sitting. “He’s back early.”

  “I pleaded a headache to Mistress Magnus,” said Learned Edmund, putting his face in his hands. “Oh, I’m a fool.”

  Slate raised her eyebrows and glanced at Caliban. The paladin shook his head marginally.

  “I should have guessed immediately. I should have guessed the moment we saw them. No, I should have guessed before it. That was why Brother Amadai was drawing them.”

  “Are we going to have to guess?” asked Slate acerbically.

  Learned Edmund gave her a woeful look. “All I had to do was ask Mistress Magnus. It wasn’t a secret. It’s not any kind of secret among the artificers. Why didn’t I see it before?”

  “Animal, vegetable, or mineral?” asked Slate.

  “Is it bigger than a breadbox?” asked Brenner.

  Caliban sighed and intervened. “Learned Edmund, we are all of us blind sometimes. It is our lot as humans. Please tell us what you have learned.”

  Brenner rolled his eyes and shot Slate a look. Slate put her chin in her hand.

  Well, I suppose paladins know how to talk to priests…

  Learned Edmund sat up straight in the chair. “Yes. You’re right, of course. My pride is the least injury here.” He took a deep breath. “The clocktaurs. They’re coming out of a wonder-engine.”

  “Like that thing in the field?” asked Brenner.

  The scholar nodded. “Exactly like. They unearthed it some years ago. The artificers are very dismissive of the clocktaurs. They are not made by modern skill, but by some engineering of the ancients.”

  Slate could see this all too easily. The artificers were prickly and often protective of thei
r secrets. Having superior killing machines produced in great quantity by unskilled means would certainly gall them.

  Feed materials in, get a clocktaur out—and no one has to get paid. Oh, the artificers would be furious…I can’t believe that none of the Dowager’s spies ever thought to ask one.

  Of course, if they thought the artificers were making the things, perhaps it didn’t occur to them to ask. You don’t walk up to the enemy and say, “Excuse me, how are you doing that?”

  Unless you’re poor dumb brilliant Learned Edmund, who just assumes that of course someone will tell you if you ask politely. And it turns out he’s right.

  “A wonder-engine,” said Caliban. The paladin dropped into a chair, looking exhausted. “How in the Dreaming God’s name do we fight that?”

  “You’re sure that this woman you’re talking to is telling the truth?” asked Brenner. “You can trust her?”

  “Of course,” said Learned Edmund, looking surprised that anyone would ask.

  “It makes sense,” said Slate. “That weird ivory stuff they’re made out of…it looks a lot like the stuff the wonder-engine was made from, doesn’t it? And you’re getting things out that shouldn’t work, but do.”

  The scholar nodded to her. “Completely correct. They are feeding something into it—I know not what—and getting out clocktaurs.”

  Slate felt her heart sink. The column of figures had all been tallied, and there, at the bottom, was something she didn’t like at all.

  No matter how many times she added it up, though, it didn’t change.

  “I’ve got a pretty good idea what they’re using,” she said.

  Every eye turned to her. On the floor, Grimehug let out the thinnest thread of a whine.

  “They’re feeding it werkblight corpses.”

  Nineteen

  “How in hell do we dismantle a wonder-engine?” asked Caliban.

  Several hours had passed. Caliban had gone off, taken a hot bath, and come back. Everyone was still repeating variations on this question, mostly to thin air. This time, unusually, Learned Edmund answered.

  “I don’t think we do,” he said. “They’re not indestructible, but they’re awfully close. When Carex mercenaries sacked the city-state of Romanga, the wonder-engine took almost no damage.”

  “They take the Clockwork Boys apart by dropping them into pits and smashing them apart with sledgehammers,” said Caliban. “At least, that’s the way they were doing it before I was—well.”

  Rain beat at the windowpanes. Brenner poked up the fire and Grimehug grumbled on the hearthrug.

  “Boiling,” said Slate. “Boiling works pretty well, but it’s hard to get the things to hold still long enough. Hot oil slows them down at bit. Could we heat the wonder-engine?”

  Learned Edmund lifted his hands, baffled. “We could try. One was damaged in the Great Fire of Halting—although they never learned what it does, so it’s possible that it still works.”

  “The Great Fire went on for six days,” said Caliban, “and killed hundreds, if not thousands.”

  “I suppose we could try setting the Clockwork District on fire,” said Brenner. “Although they’re right by the river, so they might put it out more quickly. I’m not sure how we’d arrange a sustained fire around the wonder-engine…”

  “Ahem,” said Caliban. “I said, ‘killed hundreds, if not thousands.’”

  “Yes, I heard.”

  “That doesn’t bother you?”

  “Do you think it would bother the Dowager?” asked Brenner.

  “It would bother me,” said Caliban.

  “Yes, but I could kill you and then no one would be bothered.”

  Slate rubbed a hand over her face. “Gentlemen—”

  Learned Edmund said “Before anyone sets anything on fire, perhaps we should attempt to ascertain whether we are, indeed, correct in our assumptions. We have only Mistress Slate’s observations about the grave-gnoles. And while I trust Mistress Magnus’s information, she has not, herself, seen the wonder-engine.”

  “I’d love to be wrong,” said Slate. “Truly!” She drummed her fingers on her knee. “But it makes sense. If you steal corpses, people notice. People don’t like it when Grandma goes missing. But if Grandma had werkblight, nobody expects to see her again. They’re just glad that somebody took her away where she won’t infect anybody else.”

  “You think the people behind the clocktaurs are spreading the werkblight?” asked Brenner.

  All three of them stared at him.

  “What? If I wanted a lot of corpses nobody’d miss, I’d start a plague too.”

  “Such a crime would be considered monstrous by all known authorities,” said Caliban.

  “Yeah, the people generating unstoppable giant killing machines are probably real concerned about that.”

  “As no one knows how the werkblight is spread, it seems unlikely that it is deliberate,” said Learned Edmund. “What gain would there be in killing those people in the town that we passed, when there would be no access to the bodies?”

  “The Blight’s been around here for a few years,” said Slate. “The Clockwork Boys didn’t show up until later. I’m thinking maybe the people who needed bodies just got lucky. And clever.”

  “It is quite possible that the exact manner of death does not matter,” said Learned Edmund. “The grave-gnoles are taking the werkblight corpses because those are what they are supposed to take. If they took a corpse that did not have werkblight, it might work just as well.”

  “That makes more sense,” said Slate. She felt a sudden relief, although she couldn’t have said why. “If wonder-engines are really from the ancients, then they’d have wanted to feed them something that they’d have on hand. Everybody says werkblight’s new.”

  “Or an old disease that has re-emerged,” said Learned Edmund. “They do that, sometimes. There’s a monograph about the summer fevers that—”

  Slate moaned and dropped her head again.

  “Perhaps another time,” said Caliban.

  “Look,” said Brenner, “that bit doesn’t matter, does it? We can’t very well choke off their supply of corpses.”

  “Can we?” asked Caliban.

  The assassin gave him a sidelong look. “My job is making more corpses. The only way I could make less is if I retired early.”

  “You could always take holy orders,” said Caliban.

  Brenner snorted. “Your body count’s probably higher than mine, paladin. And I didn’t have priests to hold them down for me—”

  “Enough.”

  Slate wasn’t surprised that she’d said it, but she was a little surprised at how much it sounded like an order.

  Caliban actually snapped to attention. Brenner rolled his eyes and put both of his hands ostentatiously over his mouth.

  Much more of this and I’ll get used to giving orders. Perish the thought.

  Still, if it keeps them from each other’s throats…

  She attempted to drag the conversation back to a useful direction. “I suppose what we need now is to talk to a grave-gnole.”

  “Oh, as to that…” Learned Edumund sat up, looking more cheerful than he had in hours. “The gnole culture is really quite fascinating.”

  On the floor, Grimehug rolled his eyes.

  “Ah?” asked Slate.

  “Indeed. They have a very complex caste system, did you know? Grimehug is a job-gnole, which makes him socially inferior to a hunt-gnole or a garden-gnole—”

  Grimehug curled his lip back to show one fang. “Strong words, book man.”

  “No offense intended, Grimehug. Inferior is meant without censure. Indeed, I find the notion that your society honors food producers to be marvelous.”

  “All right, then.”

  “Would you prefer to explain it? You are certainly the expert, and I do not wish to presume to speak for your people.”

  The gnole threw Slate a look of tolerant amusement. “You go ahead, book man. Humans explain better to othe
r humans. A gnole will speak up if a human gets it wrong.”

  “Thank you, Grimehug. Please do, I don’t wish to perpetrate any misunderstandings.” He cleared his throat. “Now, as I was saying, Grimehug here, is, however, socially superior to a junk-gnole, a rag-and-bone gnole, and a grave-gnole. And because he’s a job-gnole, he speaks our language much better than most of his contemporaries. Among humans, he’d be considered a skilled negotiator.”

  Somewhat mollified by this, Grimehug stretched out and closed his eyes again.

  “The grave-gnoles are the lowest caste. They handle the dead, particularly plague victims. I get the feeling that grave-gnoles are a relatively new development in gnole society. Most of the words for them are borrowed human words, not gnole words, whereas job-gnole is actually a translation of—oh, I don’t know if I can explain it! ‘One who sees that things are accomplished,’ maybe.”

  Grimehug grunted. “Close enough.”

  “This is riveting,” said Brenner, in a not-very-riveted tone, “but does it get us any closer to the factory?”

  “Patience, Brenner.” Learned Edmund held up a hand. “If Mistress Slate is correct about the fuel for the clocktaur wonder-engine—and I must say, it makes a dreadful kind of sense—then the logical people to contact are, indeed, the grave-gnoles.”

  Grimehug scowled. The fur on the back of his neck spiked up.

  “If Grimehug here is prevented by social convention from contacting a grave-gnole—”

  “God’s stripes,” muttered Grimehug. “Ever smelled a grave-gnole, book man?”

  “Well, no. But please correct me if I am wrong, Grimehug, but can you speak to a rag-and-bone gnole on our behalf?”

  “Oh, sure.” Grimehug’s fur smoothed. “Rag-and-bone gnole is no problem.”

  “And could a rag-and-bone gnole speak to a grave-gnole?”

  Grimehug shrugged. “Suppose. If some gnole wanted to. None of my business.”

  Slate went down on one knee. “Grimehug, would you be willing to find us a rag-and-bone gnole to talk to? One who could ask a grave-gnole questions for us.”

  The gnole drew his lips down, revealing his fangs. “Asking a lot, Crazy Slate.”