The Wonder Engine_Book Two of the Clocktaur War

by T. Kingfisher

  “I know.” She rubbed her bicep. The tattoo had been quiet since they reached the city. Apparently it thought she was trying her best.

  He considered for a moment. Then he looked over her shoulder at Learned Edmund. “Want something, book man.”

  “Anything I can do, Grimehug,” said Learned Edmund.

  “Writing down stuff about gnoles,” said Grimehug. “Book about gnoles, maybe?”

  “I’d like to write a book about your people, yes. I don’t think anyone has.”

  “Nobody has,” said Grimehug. “Lots of human books. No gnole books. You write a book about gnoles, yeah? Well, a gnole wants to know what’s in it, first. Humans say a lot of things. Want to make sure they say the right things about gnoles.”

  Learned Edmund nodded. “That is very fair, Grimehug. In fact, I will write a letter to my brothers at the Temple of the Many-Armed God stating that a monograph on gnoles is long overdue and that you are to be consulted, in case something happens to us here. Will that satisfy you?”

  Grimehug nodded. He glanced up at Slate. “Book man’s word good, Crazy Slate?”

  “Word’s good,” said Slate. “Better than my word, probably.”

  “Then a gnole finds you a rag-and-bone gnole,” said Grimehug. He walked to the balcony and opened the glass doors. They heard the rattling as he swung himself down the drainpipe.

  “Got off lightly,” said Brenner, shutting the doors against the rain. “I’d think he’d want more.”

  “On the contrary,” said Learned Edmund. “Wanting control over the way his people are represented—that’s a very large thing. And a very sophisticated one.”

  “Grimehug’s no fool,” said Slate. “And the gnoles are everywhere, have you noticed? There’s probably as many gnoles as humans in this city, and they’re controlling some pretty vital services. It’s a little unsettling.”

  “As long as he’s on our side,” said Brenner.

  “Some days I don’t know if we’re even on our side,” said Slate.

  “It’s not as easy as just writing down things,” said Learned Edmund. “The gnoles have no written language. As near as I can tell, each word’s meaning changes based on the posture of the speaker. Have you noticed how Grimehug moves his ears? To him, that literally changes the nature of the words he’s speaking.”

  “Huh?” said Brenner.

  Learned Edmund sighed and sat back. “Take—oh—crazy. You know he says that a lot?”

  “I’d noticed,” said Slate dryly.

  “Yes, well. The thing is that in gnolespeech, he’d be saying twenty different words. The vocal component is only part of it. The rest is in the ears and the whiskers and the posture and maybe some other things I don’t know how to ask about. But because we only recognize the spoken word, we don’t understand all the nuance.”

  He picked up a sheet of parchment from the table. “I started trying to write down all the meanings the other night. He told me as many as he could. Actually, he told me I was crazy trying to write it all down, but with ears up and whiskers forward, which means ‘doing something silly,’ and I think there might have been another nuance that I didn’t catch that said he was going to humor me. And a word that means so far in love that your behavior is irrational, and a word that means drunk or intoxicated on drugs. And when he says ‘Humans are crazy,’ that’s another word that means ‘doing things that make no sense to gnoles but presumably make sense to humans.’ But when he calls you Crazy Slate, that means that he thinks you’re brave but—ah—not sensibly so—”

  “Completely nuts,” said Brenner.

  “That’s the impression I got, yes,” admitted Learned Edmund. “It’s a compliment, sort of, but also a warning to other people that you don’t always act in your own best interest.”

  Slate rubbed her hand over her face. Naturally Grimehug was warning other gnoles against her. That was only sensible.

  “Ironically, the word for insanity is something else entirely,” said Learned Edmund. “I had to explain what I meant. We went in circles around the concepts of unpredictable behavior, because he kept saying that the mentally ill were usually predictable, so crazy was the wrong set of words to use.”

  “This is all fascinating,” said Slate, “but be honest. Is Grimehug only here to keep an eye on us?”

  The scholar looked sheepish. “Not only. He is genuinely fond of you. But he’s not—ermm—completely altruistic, I don’t think. The word he uses for you means that people in your vicinity might get hurt.”

  Brenner laughed. Learned Edmund gave him a nettled look. “Meanwhile, the word he uses for Brenner here means that Brenner hurts people deliberately.”

  “It’s a living,” said Brenner, not all ruffled. “But what’s the point of all this?”

  “The point is that Grimehug’s vocabulary is probably twice the size of yours,” said Learned Edmund. “And I’ve got no idea how to write it down and I don’t think a human could ever really learn to speak it at all.”

  “Speaking of people with large vocabularies,” said Slate, “did you find anything else out about your lost scholar?”

  “Oh.” Learned Edmund’s enthusiasm faded. “Brother Amadai’s workshop is gone. I asked if the people using it knew where he had gone. They said no, that he had stopped paying the rent and left everything behind.”

  Slate winced. “Did his notes get lost? It seemed like, from what you said, he’d be the one most likely to know how to destroy a wonder engine.”

  “Thankfully, no,” said Learned Edmund. “The artificers take that sort of thing very seriously. All his research notes were taken to the Guild archives.”

  “So they’re there now? In these archives?”

  Learned Edmund nodded. “I hope, as a fellow dedicate of the Many-Armed God, that they will allow me access to them.”

  “Well, if they don’t, there are other ways.”

  He looked puzzled.

  “You want paper stolen, our Slate’s a gem,” said Brenner.

  “Stealing from a library?” said Learned Edmund in horror.

  “It’s a living,” echoed Slate. She stood up. “I’m taking a nap. Seems like all we can do now is wait.”

  Twenty

  Wait they did, until long after dark. Caliban lit the oil lamps. Learned Edmund scribbled in his notebook. Slate didn’t know whether he was writing about wonder-engines or the social habits of gnoles or the personal dynamics of four tired, worried humans with a terrible secret. It didn’t seem to matter much. She tried not to sigh.

  Caliban took down the padded jerkin that he wore under his armor and began mending a tear in it. Slate looked over at the tiny, exact stitches and shook her head, bemused.

  “You should have told me you could sew.”

  He glanced up at her. “Fighting demons is hard on your clothes. And paladins don’t inspire confidence when they’re wearing rags.”

  “I’ve got at least three shirts with holes in them.”

  He heaved a sigh. “Bring them here…”

  “Are you taking requests?” asked Brenner.

  Caliban pinched the bridge of his nose. “Why did I admit to anything?”

  Slate returned with an armful of clothes. Caliban picked up the shirt she had been wearing when she dropped onto the rune and wrinkled his nose. “I am a paladin, not a resurrectionist. This shirt is dead.”

  “I liked that shirt.”

  “I can give it last rites. That’s as far as I’ll go.”

  “Fine, fine…”

  She curled up in a chair and watched as he set to work on the surviving shirts with needle and thread.

  Caliban’s hands had been one of the first things she had studied when she had found him in the prison cell so many weeks ago. He had set his hands on the bars next to hers. His fingers were covered in small white defensive scars. Hers, much smaller, were stained with ink and mottled with marks from engraver’s acid.

  At the time, her chief concern about his hands had been whether he
would try to snap her neck through the bars.

  Now she watched his hands moving over the fabric and could imagine all too easily what they would feel like on her skin.

  Being weak again. Dammit, Caliban, why did you have to go and say all those stupid things?

  And why do you have to be so goddamn pretty?

  He looked up at her and smiled. She scowled at him.

  “Am I using the wrong color thread?”

  “What? Oh. No, it’s fine. It’s…it’s the waiting.” She gestured vaguely toward the window. Which is not a complete lie, anyway.

  His expression cleared. “Ah. I understand, believe me.”

  He bent his head over the fabric again and Slate thought dark thoughts behind her eyes.

  Eventually there was a scrabbling at the drainpipe. Brenner vanished and a minute later, he and Grimehug came over the railing. He straightened his rags and looked up at them. “Found a gnole,” he said. “Will talk with you, book man, and Crazy Slate.” He glanced between Caliban and Brenner. “Not you, big man, or you, dark man. Smell too much like death. Scare a gnole away.”

  “You don’t expect us to let them go alone!” said Caliban.

  “Down, boy,” said Slate, annoyed. “We’re coming, Grimehug. Let me go get my robes on.”

  Caliban tried to give her a meaningful look. Slate smiled pleasantly, refusing to take any meaning from it.

  She made it as far as her room when he caught up with her. “Slate—”

  “If you’re going to talk, help me get this boot on.”

  He dropped to one knee and held the boot open, a gesture as practiced as a sword drill. Slate shook her head, amused. Of course. How many years do paladins spend as squires before they kit them out with armor?

  “This could be a trap,” said Caliban.

  “Yep,” said Slate. She handed him the other boot.

  “You shouldn’t go alone.”

  “Nope.”

  “It could be terribly dangerous.”

  “Yep.”

  He paused, still holding the second boot. Slate wiggled her toes at him. She was wearing his extra socks.

  His lips twisted. “You’re going anyway, aren’t you?”

  “Yep.”

  “Am I being an arrogant jackass again?”

  “You’re right on the edge.”

  He sighed.

  “I’ll be with Grimehug,” she said, relenting. “And I’ll protect Learned Edmund—as much as one can, anyhow. And if it were Brenner going, not me, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”

  He bowed his head and put on her other boot.

  When he pulled her to her feet, there was a brief moment where their bodies pressed together, Slate’s shoulder against his chest and her right thigh against his left. They both paused for a half-second too long, then sprang apart.

  I am too old for this, thought Slate. Caliban had his typical inscrutable paladin absolutely-nothing-going-on-here-ma’am expression. I am thirty years old, for god’s sake. I should kick his feet out from under him and sit on his chest and tell him “Look, I saved your armor-plated ass from the rune so don’t give me any crap about the strong and the weak. I don’t see you getting any better offers.”

  I should.

  Not right now, though.

  “Are you all right?” asked Caliban.

  “It’s these damn shoes,” muttered Slate.

  Twenty-One

  The night was wet with drizzle. Anuket City did not get a rainy season as such, but it got a damp season and they were in the middle of it. Puddles shone along the cobblestones and gurgled into the storm drains.

  Grimehug was waiting for them in the alley. “This way, Crazy Slate. You too, book man.”

  They followed him into the alley, through twists and turns. The trash cans here were tight together, and even Slate had to go sidewise. “Doesn’t matter if he wanted to come or not,” muttered Slate, “we’d never have fit Caliban down here.”

  Learned Edmund nodded. “I suspect these ways are used mostly by gnoles.”

  Grimehug glanced over his shoulders. “Suspect correct, book man. Humans leave alleys too big, waste space. A gnole fits.”

  “A human doesn’t,” muttered Slate, turning sideways and sucking in her breath.

  A gnole scrabbled out from underneath a wooden bin. She seemed to be mostly eyes, and her badger-like stripes were huge on her small face.

  “This gnole is named Sweet Lily,” announced Grimehug.

  Learned Edmund bowed. Slate, for lack of anything better to do, bowed as well.

  “A gnole meets you,” said Sweet Lily. Her accent was much thicker than Grimehug’s. “Is well.” She ducked her head and her ears.

  “This gnole has found a grave-gnole,” Grimehug added, his lip curled as if smelling something disgusting. “This gnole is a good gnole, though.”

  “We are very grateful for the help,” said Learned Edmund.

  “Not going to be grateful for the smell,” muttered Grimehug.

  Sweet Lily led them onward into…what? wondered Slate. The Gnole Quarter? Do they have their own quarter now?

  Given the enormous number of gnoles that had settled into the city since she left, perhaps so.

  A tiny alley nearby led to an equally tiny courtyard. In it, wrapped in ragged shrouds, sat a grave-gnole.

  The courtyard itself was full of garbage, bits of old wooden packing crates and broken ends of chairs. It looked like a place where people threw things away. The grave-gnole fit among them very well.

  Sweet Lily went up to the gnole and began chattering to it animatedly. Grimehug’s ears were flat back.

  Learned Edmund crouched down in front of the grave-gnole. Slate could not read any expression on its face, but she remembered what the dedicate had said about the gnole language. Undoubtedly there were volumes being spoken in the twitch of whiskers and the positions of their ears.

  “Do you understand this language?” Learned Edmund asked the grave-gnole.

  The grave-gnole did not take its eyes off him, but it leaned over and spoke to Sweet Lily.

  “A gnole says a gnole understands,” she said. “But a gnole hears better than a gnole speaks. This gnole will speak their words.”

  Learned Edmund nodded. He continued to address the grave-gnole, and Slate gave him points for that.

  “Do they have a name I may call them?”

  Grimehug snorted. Slate felt embarrassed. She liked Grimehug, not to mention the small matter of him being the key to figuring out the clocktaurs, but his casual loathing of the grave-gnoles was more than a little troubling.

  They are not human, she reminded herself. I should not judge them on human terms. There may be reasons that I won’t understand.

  And even if Grimehug’s just being an ass, he’s the only lead we’ve got, so this really isn’t the time.

  The grave-gnole’s name was silent. It seemed to be a long exhaled breath and a hand passed over top of another hand. Learned Edmund looked helplessly at Slate, who shrugged just as helplessly back.

  “Please ask—” he attempted the grave-gnole’s name—” about where they take the werkblight corpses…”

  They tried. They really did. The problem was that while Sweet Lily spoke the trade language reasonably well, their questions required a very specialized vocabulary. The gnolespeech had no words for ‘wonder-engine’ and ‘roof access’ was mostly a matter of pointing and mime. Learned Edmund tried to ask about possible controls for the clocktaurs and received two sets of blank looks from Sweet Lily and the grave-gnole alike.

  Grimehug finally groaned and stationed himself next to Sweet Lily. “This gnole will translate for a rag-and-bone gnole,” he said. “Not for a grave-gnole. Ask your questions, book-man.”

  This made things go a great deal more smoothly. It was blatantly obvious that the grave-gnole was listening to Grimehug, but Sweet Lily dutifully repeated what he said to the grave-gnole, then repeated what the grave-gnole said back.

  Sl
ate was glad that Brenner wasn’t here to see this. He would not have been diplomatic.

  The grave-gnoles learned where bodies were from other gnoles. The other gnoles didn’t exactly address them, as near as Slate could tell, they would merely mention loudly, to thin air, that a plague death had occurred, and the grave-gnoles would go and get the body. The bodies were placed in the carts and taken through the gnole-sized doors in the Clockwork District. The doors were about two years old. Before that, they would wait outside the door for someone to notice them. How did they know where to take the corpses? A deal had been made several years ago. Humans had dealt with the bodies before, but humans didn’t want to do it now. Humans caught werkblight. Gnoles didn’t. Humans paid the grave-gnoles to take the werkblight corpses away.

  What humans had made the deal? The grave-gnole didn’t know. Other humans. With other grave-gnoles. Now the bargain was in place. No one asked about it.

  Slate thought of the innkeeper saying Not my job. “Like the knackermen. Nobody bothers to ask who first hired them to take dead horses away. They’re just glad that somebody’s doing it before it starts to stink.”

  Grimehug paused in translation long enough to nod to her. “Like that, Crazy Slate. Yes.”

  * * *

  Was there a way in? There was the way the grave-gnoles went. Another way? There was the human way. Many guards. The grave-gnole—Slate was thinking of this one as Breath-swipe, which she knew was a tragically human approximation—did not know how many guards. Many.

  “Is more than ten,” said Sweet Lily. “Is…probably not one hundred.”

  Once the gnoles went through the door with the bodies, they passed through an open courtyard. There were guards on top of the roof. There were none down at the ground. Guards didn’t want werkblight. There was a big building in the middle. Breath-swipe thought it was like the buildings that humans made to put their things in, not to live in.

  “A warehouse?” said Slate.

  Grimehug, Sweet Lily, and Breath-swipe had a three-way conversation for a moment before Grimehug agreed. Yes. Something like a warehouse.