The Wonder Engine_Book Two of the Clocktaur War

by T. Kingfisher

  Humans can’t smell.

  At the moment, she was smelling more than she wanted to. Mostly garlic. And a whiff of…

  Oh hell.

  Rosemary.

  We must be getting close. That’s it. It’s just raising the alarm. Slate’s eyes were already closed, but she squeezed them shut under the shroud, concentrating savagely on not sneezing, on lying absolutely quiet…

  You’ve alerted me. I’m alerted. Please don’t give me away. Please.

  The gnole-cart stopped. The front bumped downward as the grave-gnoles set down their poles.

  Slate breathed through her open mouth, tiny sips of air across her tongue. Her lungs screamed for a larger breath. Her nose was dripping and the fact that she could not wipe it was a torture worse than anything Boss Horsehead’s professional had done to her.

  She heard creaks of wood, a dragging sound on stone. Then the grave-gnoles picked up their poles again and the cart bumped forward.

  Was that the gate? Was that all there was to it? Did nobody check?

  She could practically hear Caliban in her head yelling—“If these guards were under my command, I would have them up on charges! This is negligence!”

  Still, what are they going to do? Get down and poke us? Expose themselves to werkblight just to make sure the dead are really dead?

  Was it the werkblight that got you, Frederick? Am I exposed now?

  Frederick said nothing, but Slate had to think that lying under a werkblight corpse, even for only half an hour or so, was an excellent way to make sure you were exposed.

  Then again… ‘No gnoles allowed’ the innkeeper had said. ‘They carry werkblight’. And Grimehug slept at the foot of my bed for weeks. He’d still be there, except that Caliban’s been taking up valuable real estate.

  Well, and we’re in a gnole burrow at last. He probably has his real friends and family to dogpile with.

  You’d think we’d all have it by now. Or maybe we do, and there’s a long time before it manifests.

  Now there was a pleasant thought.

  Oh well, as long as it holds off until after we get to the bottom of this… She just couldn’t get too worked up about potential plague when there were guards, presumably not that far away, who would fill her full of arrows if they could.

  The echoes changed as the grave-gnoles entered a building. Slate had only an instant of warning before the cart upended and she and Frederick were dumped unceremoniously onto something lax and lumpy and…

  It’s more bodies. I know it’s more bodies.

  Slate went as bonelessly limp as she could. She couldn’t quite suppress a hiss of air out of her lungs, but hopefully any watchers would think that was just the sounds of bodies settling.

  On the one hand, she was now draped over Frederick instead of the other way around and could breathe.

  On the other hand, the other bodies smelled a lot worse than Frederick.

  None of them were in full on rot, or Slate would have lost her lunch and secrecy be damned, but there was definitely a scent of heavy decay.

  Thank the gods it’s been cool lately instead of hot, or this would be really bad.

  She waited.

  Another gnole-cart entered the room and was dumped out. Brenner’s, hopefully, but if so, the assassin was keeping quiet. Slate couldn’t see anything through her shroud and she couldn’t tell if the sounds of breathing were from the grave-gnoles or if there was another guard in the room as well.

  The carts ground away on their creaking wooden wheels. The third cart was emptied out. Something landed with a clatter of metal.

  It’s got to be Caliban. Sword and armor and all the rest.

  She listened to the gnole-cart being drawn away. A door closed.

  Silence.

  It seemed like three people listening intently should make a sound, or perhaps the opposite of a sound. But there was nothing.

  Are there any guards?

  Are Brenner and Caliban even here? Did we get separated?

  Are we all waiting for someone else to speak up?

  Slate sneezed.

  She got less than a half-second of warning on it, not enough to muffle it. She just sneezed and that meant that she might as well sit up and yank the shroud off her eyes because she was pretty obviously not a corpse.

  “Well,” drawled Brenner, “I guess that means you made it too, Slate darlin’.”

  “Are there any guards?” She clawed at the shroud. Ashes had done entirely too good a job wrapping it.

  “I’m not seeing any.”

  “I don’t believe there are any in this room,” said Caliban softly.

  “Looks like we all made it,” said Brenner.

  Slate finally got her shroud off in time to see Caliban extract himself from a pile of bodies.

  The room was large, with two barn-sized doors where the carts entered and left. The floor was packed earth and the bodies lay piled carelessly in a shallow trench that ran in a semi-circle along the back wall. A smaller door was set in the wall behind the trench.

  Brenner adjusted his knives. Slate wiped her nose. The paladin signed a benediction over the corpses beside him.

  She cleared her throat. It was probably stupid, but…

  “Can you do that for this guy, too?”

  Brenner snorted. Caliban, though, came and stood beside her. “This one?”

  “Yeah.” And then, even though he hadn’t asked for an explanation: “We, uh, rode over together.”

  The paladin nodded and signed the Dreaming God’s benediction over Frederick.

  “Thanks,” said Slate.

  “If we’re all done wasting time, there’s only one way farther in,” said Brenner, gesturing to the small door. “It’s locked.” He glanced at Slate. “You or me, darlin’?”

  “Me,” said Slate. “You just get ready to stab anybody who comes through.”

  “With pleasure.”

  The lock was the sort of thing purchased by people who have been ordered to put a lock on a door, and are more concerned about obeying orders than about anyone actually showing up to pick said lock. Slate popped it open in the space of a couple of measured breaths, even though she had to stop and sneeze afterward.

  “Rosemary?” asked Caliban, handing her a handkerchief.

  “Coming from somewhere inside, I think,” said Slate, wiping her nose. “But whether it means something or whether it’s because there’s clocktaurs or an active wonder-engine, don’t ask me.”

  Brenner eased the door open a fraction and peered through the crack.

  “One guard,” he murmured. “Down at the end of the hall. We’re on a corner here. We can slip out without him seeing us, if somebody can manage not to clank.”

  “I’ll do my best.”

  The paladin’s footfalls sounded incredibly loud to Slate, but somehow the guard didn’t turn his head. He didn’t look much like a guard at all. Slate couldn’t see any weapons. He wore a stained apron and heavy leather gloves.

  Now why do I suspect his job is to drag the bodies somewhere, not to make sure the bodies are all dead…?

  Brenner was the last one through. He eased the door shut again behind him. His feet made no sound at all.

  They crept around the corner, out of sight. Slate made a mental note to teach Caliban how to sneak, if they survived.

  Can’t do much with the armor, I suppose…although there’s a few clinking bits that we could probably trade out for carved wood or muffle with some cloth…at least there’s no twigs to step on here. But seriously, I could take this man up on a rooftop and he would sound like a herd of wild horses.

  Well, it probably wasn’t his fault. You didn’t meet that many thieves who specialized in breaking and entering who were six-foot-plus and had shoulders like an ox.

  Let’s see, I’ve known…what, two? Gemmy the Wall and Hard Payne. Gemmy was even taller and he sure didn’t miss any meals, and he still moved like a dancer. So it can be done…

  This train of thought got
her down the corridor. The problem with sneaking into places was that it was an excruciating combination of nerve-wracking and incredibly dull.

  They slunk along the hallway, listening, moving at a snail’s pace. There were drag marks on the floor, a hard, waxy-looking grime that spoke of repeated use and half-hearted cleanings. Some of the drag marks were dark brown and rusty-looking.

  She pointed to one that was so obviously blood that it might as well have had a label. Brenner nodded. Caliban looked grim.

  Finally, they fetched up against another door. This one wasn’t even locked. Slate tried it and rolled her eyes.

  “How are people not breaking into here constantly?” she whispered to Brenner.

  “Maybe there’s nothing worth lifting.”

  “Suppose it’s hard to shove a clocktaur under your coat.”

  They opened the door very quietly and stepped into a vast room, larger even than the Grey Church. Like the Church, it had been excavated downward so that the walls fell away around them.

  Catwalks crossed the emptiness and metal grates creaked underfoot, and finally, finally, somebody saw them.

  Forty-Three

  Slate’s nerves were keyed so tightly that seeing someone turn and gape at them was almost a relief. At least she could stop waiting for it to happen now.

  The man who spotted them was also wearing a leather apron. He was sitting on the edge of the metal platform, back to the door. When the metal creaked as they stepped onto it, he turned his head, saying “It is isn’t time yet, the last one’s not gone down—”

  And then he stopped and stared at them.

  What he thought about the trio facing him, no one would ever find out. Brenner stepped forward, grabbed his hair, hauled his head back, and slit his throat in one cool, professional motion.

  Slate winced. There was a lot of blood. There always was when somebody did that.

  Brenner glanced over the side of the metal platform, then nodded and pushed the aproned man over. Slate heard the body hit wooden boards, a few scratching sounds…then nothing.

  “We might have immobilized him,” said Caliban softly. “Tied him up. He did not look like a guard or a soldier.”

  “You know,” said Brenner, “his job was stuffing corpses into that. So I’m not feeling a lot of remorse right now.” He pointed over the edge of the grate.

  She looked over.

  On that side of the platform, someone had rigged a crude wooden hopper. The hopper fed into a chute, which fed into a twisted mass of ivory.

  It was so large that it took a moment for her eyes to make sense of it. It looked more like a landscape than a face. But once she saw that the hole the chute led to was a mouth, it all snapped into focus. A gaping mouth with teeth like bone stalagmites, eyes screwed up tight. Not a human, this time, but some monstrous hybrid of wolf and sow, muzzle corrugated into a snarl.

  It was the wonder-engine, of course.

  Its forepaws were stretched forward, its back humped upward. If it had a tail, it was tucked between its legs.

  Sheltered underneath the wonder-engine stood a vast mass of ivory and gears.

  Clocktaurs.

  Three on each side, the ones in front nearly complete, the ones in back looking oddly unfinished. They were not moving, but the crust of ivory gears moved and shifted and ratcheted back and forth, so the impression was of living, squirming motion.

  “Dear god,” whispered Caliban, swallowing hard. He sounded shaken, and that bothered Slate almost as much as the wonder-engine did. This was an engine fueled by demons and of all of them, Caliban was the one who should have been most able to deal with it.

  “It’s building them underneath,” said Brenner.

  Slate grimaced. “It’s not building them,” she said. “It’s nursing them.”

  She could tell when the assassin and the paladin both saw it too, because they both grunted, one on each side of her, making twin sounds of disgust.

  “It’s a machine,” said Brenner. “How can it nurse anything?”

  “How do the clocktaurs walk?” asked Slate. “How does any of it work? It’s a damnable abomination from the damnable ancients, that’s how.”

  “I like the ones that turn pears into gold better.”

  “I don’t think they would have sent us to destroy one of those.”

  They stared at it. It was gigantic, far bigger than the wonder-engine they had seen in the Vagrant Hills. The notion of destroying it seemed laughable. Where would they even start?

  What are we going to do? Have Brenner throw knives at it? Tell Caliban to hit it with his sword a few times?

  Slate shook her head in disbelief. How had they been so arrogant as to think that they could do anything? The civilization that made this had been vast and terrible, powerful enough to put their dead into machines that could destroy nearly anything. What could three people possibly do against it?

  She put out a hand blindly and caught Caliban’s forearm. He reached over and squeezed her fingers, carefully since he was wearing gauntlets.

  A grip from metal and leather should not have been comforting, but at this point, Slate would take what she could get.

  “What do we do now?” she said. “Go home and tell the Dowager it was impossible?”

  The tattoo did not like that idea. Slate slapped her bicep irritably. “Would you rather we throw ourselves into the thing one at a time and let them make clocktaurs out of us?”

  And now I’m yelling at my own arm. This is not helping.

  “There’s something up there,” said Brenner, pointing.

  Slate hadn’t looked up since she saw the wonder-engine. Her gaze followed Brenner’s arm, past a jumble of catwalks, to a strange shape.

  “It looks like a pinecone,” she said, frowning. “Or a flower.”

  “Doubt it’s any one of those, darlin’, but we might as well take a look.”

  “It looks like one of Brother Amadai’s drawings,” rumbled Caliban.

  The catwalks ran back and forth like…what had the grave-gnoles called them? Metal spiderwebs?

  We were close. They must have seen through the door, but not into the room itself.

  They seemed haphazardly placed, as if they had been installed during the excavation and no one had bothered to move them. Fortunately, most of them had railings. The trio climbed up multiple ladders, watching for guards, and yet the whole room was eerily silent except for their footsteps.

  Why would they need guards? What could mere humans possibly do to that?

  What human guards could stand to watch that thing for long?

  It took some time to find the sequence of ladders that would lead to the catwalk nearest the strange object. When they reached it at last, it became obvious that of them, Caliban had been the closest to correct.

  It was a man.

  He hung suspended over the wonder-engine on iron chains, spread-eagled. He seemed to have too many arms, and it took Slate a moment to realize that there were strange ivory spines coming out of his back, the size of elephant tusks, hooked around toward the front so that they rose like arms. Each spine ended in a carved hand. The hands seemed to be the same material as the wonder-engine, which perhaps explained why they had too many fingers, or maybe explained nothing at all.

  His eyes were gone. Slate stared into the empty hollows and thought, He spent too long in the crow cage, they got his eyes, and had to shake herself to dislodge the thought.

  “Poor bastard,” she said, looking up at him. He looked as if he had died in pain.

  Clockwork was still moving on his back, the restless, ratcheting motion of gears like those on the clocktaurs themselves. Were they doing something? Was it still live, or was it a living machine, growing pistons and levers the way that an animal might grow scabs and scars?

  “Was he controlling the clocktaurs, do you think?” asked Caliban.

  Slate spread her hands helplessly. “Brother Amadai labeled this one as ‘the other device’ but…hell, I don’t know.”
/>
  “If he was, then who’s controlling them now?” asked Brenner.

  Slate leaned over the edge of the catwalk, trying to see what connected the corpse to the wonder-engine. Had it been severed? Were there others? “I’m really not sure—”

  The corpse moved.

  It rose in a ratcheting motion, like machinery, the whole clockwork mass rising a few inches, until it was level with the catwalk. The head, impossibly, turned toward Slate.

  “Don’t…talk about me…as if…I’m not…here…” breathed the man impaled by ivory.

  Forty-Four

  Oh shit oh shit oh shit

  Slate flung herself backward in sheer primitive terror. Her back hit Caliban and she stopped there. He caught her with one arm and held the sword across them both, which would have annoyed Slate except that having a sword between her and the godawful spidery corpse thing seemed like a really good idea.

  “That’s not good,” drawled Brenner.

  There was something steadying about how he said it. Assassins were hard people to impress. Brenner sounded as if he had discovered that he was out of cigarettes.

  The corpse dangled on the ivory spikes. It ratcheted up on the chains a few more notches and rotated to look eyelessly at Brenner.

  Brenner curled his lip back in disgust.

  “Did Brother Amadai do this to you?” asked Slate.

  It flexed on the end of its chain, turning back and forth as if looking between them.

  Then it laughed.

  “Oh god,” said Slate. She put a hand over her mouth. She knew what was coming next and she wanted very much to be wrong.

  The corpse’s laughter was airless and gurgling, as if the ivory spikes were forcing its ribcage up, over and over, not caring how it tore the body up inside.

  “Amadai…yessss…” The voice came out but the forced, dead laughter didn’t stop. “…I know…that name…I am…I was…Amadai…”

  “There’s a demon in him,” said Caliban.

  “Tell me something I don’t know, paladin,” said Brenner.

  Caliban glanced at him sharply. “How did you know that?”