Zeddig wanted to believe. But she remembered Kai in the engine room back on the train, so fierce, so certain, so like the Ley she knew. What’s that knife worth to you?
On the beach, Ley had begged Zeddig to back off, as earnest and as weak as she had ever been. Trust me.
If Vogel had sold them out to Bescond for protection, Ley’s knife was worth more to the Wreckers than a train of joss, thirty crooks, and two delver teams. And Ley had promised it to Zeddig if she just got her to this tower. Which meant—what, exactly?
Zeddig hopped over puddles of sphinx blood, and caught up with Ley as she pondered the tower’s front door locks. “Vogel must have given them my marker. They’re chasing us right now. Hells, they could have broken me on the train.”
Ley drew a narrow crystal prism from her belt and pressed it against the keyhole. The crystal deformed, some facets contracting while others stretched. “Which is why I swapped vials the night of the meeting.”
When she’d come home drunk. “What? How?”
“Vogel has habits. I took advantage of them.”
“Habits?”
Ley stared into the crystal as if through a kaleidoscope. “Do you really need details? Imagine he’s a majiang enthusiast, or that he really likes eight-way chess, one of those games that get you, you know, tied up. Once I made the right friends it was easy to get into his apartment, find his stash, and leave again. I told you I’d take care of it.”
“I can’t believe you.”
“Believe what you like.” She tossed her a sliver of glass and red; Zeddig’s stomach lurched, but she caught the vial, and as her hand closed around the glass she felt herself held too, as if in a giant’s grip. At this level of pressure, it didn’t feel so bad. She remembered vomiting on the floor of a bar, remembered pain curled like an ingrown nail around her spine. “Break it, if you want,” Ley said. “You’ll be fine.”
Zeddig slid the vial into her pocket while Ley bent again to the door. Ley turned her crystal to the left, and with a click and a flare of light, the door opened. Warm stale air steamed out into the desert chill.
Gal entered first, her steps so soft that Zeddig heard only the wind. They waited outside. Raymet stroked her chin with her gloved hand. Ley counted seconds on her watch. Izza and Isaak watched. “Gal will be fine,” Zeddig told them. “She does this sort of thing all the time.” No one had ever done this sort of thing before—at least, no one had never done it and survived. They’d already more than doubled the unofficial world record for a delve, Ghazik’s team’s hour twenty. But Izza and Isaak needed calming. Zeddig liked the girl: a sharp little vector who looked at everything as if it might kill her, but if it didn’t, she’d write a poem about it later. The armored seemed spooked. He knew the dead city: the place nightmares came from, and the twisted half things that jumped you mid-job when you took the wrong turn in an unmapped sewer. He knew to fear the Wastes.
They heard silence and breaking glass.
Raymet was half through the door before Gal said, “You can come in now.”
A chandelier of mutlicolored glass hung from the high ceiling. Aluminum panels stamped with friezes of alien worlds lined the walls, and beneath those panels lay low uncomfortable leather couches. The receptionist’s desk stood empty. The people who fled this building had little warning. Cardboard boxes of desk-stuff littered the floor. Paperwork spilled from multicolored folders. There should have been dust or spiderwebs, but there were no people here to shed skin, and gods must have killed the spiders.
Gal sat on top of what looked like a second, fallen chandelier. Thin cuts, already closing, lined her arms and face. She seemed at ease. Zeddig had seen illustrations in foreign books of boys sitting on pastel pastoral hills, wearing that same smile. Gal was missing the straw hat and the blade of grass between her teeth, that was all.
“It was slow.” She kicked one of the dead demon’s many arms. “Shall we?”
Zeddig trailed them up the long concrete stair. Every few floors they emerged into a red-lit hall to wander past cubicles and display banks. Glowworms had consumed their protein substrate and spilled out to devour walls and floor, leaving a writhing multicolored carpet that crunched underfoot.
A chair squeaked, turning. Zeddig jumped. The chair swiveled all the way around, empty, and came to a stop facing away from its desk. Shifted by the draft of their passage? Simple entropy, rearranging the ruin?
They climbed.
“You owe me an explanation,” Zeddig told Ley, when there was enough space between them and the others to talk without being overheard. “We’re long past ‘I don’t want to get you into trouble.’”
More stairs. A security box Ley couldn’t fix; Raymet pondered it, tiny probes in hand, ghostlamp burning on her forehead, loupe in her eye, lower lip between her teeth, while Gal knelt beside her and watched.
“Vogel sold us out,” Zeddig said, upstairs, looking down. “He must have given them our names. There will be people after my family.”
The multicolored light of Raymet’s work played over Ley’s high cheekbones, her thin lips. “When I’m gone, tell them: I only worked with her because she paid me.”
“The Wreckers are chasing that knife. Did you plan on telling us? Or were we just the next patsies in line?”
“Ah,” Raymet said. She took a lacquer box from her tool belt, opened the box with care, and removed a large cockroach from within. The roach’s legs paddled the air frantically. Stasis box, probably. Raymet snapped the roach in half, and the door opened. “We’re good.”
They filed through.
“They want the knife,” Ley said, “but they can’t catch you while you have it. They can’t stay in the dead city, only deny its existence. One delve with that thing, a suitcase of books from the Anaxmander Stacks, and you can buy your way out of any trouble. Or run off somewhere beyond Iskari law. You wouldn’t be the first.”
“And leave my city, and my people.”
“Do you think either’s so weak they can’t get on without you?”
Zeddig watched the side of her face. “So, you give me the knife, and I draw every Wrecker in the city into a wild goose chase. What do you get out of this?”
“Time,” she said.
In their winding ascent, the cubicles and offices gave way to smoother, sterile spaces, metal and bamboo and ultraviolet light. Lab coats hung on hooks. Specimens had grown to toxic forests in glass cabinets. Greenish-black tufts sprouted from black mugs that probably once held coffee with milk. The laboratories, in their turn, surrendered to halls unadorned save for countdown clocks. Gal cleared a half-open room they passed, in case a demon might be hiding there; she burst in, and Isaak, but found only large lockers full of bulky red suits like crude soft armor.
At last they reached a heavy door locked, like the train hatches, with a wheel. Ley tried to open it herself. Muscles strained beneath her jumpsuit. Zeddig couldn’t budge the wheel either. Gal and Isaak managed it together. When the hatch hinged open, Zeddig saw it was two feet thick.
Beyond the door lay a cavern.
In the cavern’s heart there stood a spear.
Beyond the door lay a cavern: for all the spire’s size, it could not possibly contain a space this big, a hollow cylinder broad enough to hold the Southern Express, bridged by spiderwebs of silk and steel, ringed with catwalks and gantries, including the narrow metal bridge that extended from their hatch to—
In the cavern’s heart there stood a spear: “spear” being the wrong word and the right at once. The shape was right: an object with haft and head, an impaling implement, yes. (Though the tip was blunted and knobbed; it would leave a grotesque wound.) But “spear” could not apply to anything this scale, made from acres of welded metal and bone; a God could throw such a thing, Zeddig thought, or a Goddess, and she wondered what sort of monster. They would need this spear to wound, or kill. All the suggestions her brain supplied were too horrible to contemplate, so she stopped herself wondering.
Good thing
she was used to the dead city. She’d forced herself to stop thinking about so much, forced herself to see the world the way cops and teachers liked. She used that practice now, to remain upright.
Ley stepped onto the gantry, and turned back to face them. “Now. This is the tricky part. Follow me, stay close, but for the love of yourselves and your family, do nothing rash, or Crafty, and certainly nothing anyone would describe as ‘springing into action.’”
Nods all around.
Ley marched onto the gantry. They followed her single file, gripping the rails with various degrees of terror. Their steps echoed into the cavern depths and back again. Someone hissed. Zeddig didn’t think it was her. The hiss grew louder beneath the racket of their steps, until Zeddig realized it was too loud to be human.
She remembered there had been no spiderwebs elsewhere in the building.
Ley was looking up.
Zeddig followed her gaze.
The tip of the spear was moving.
What Zeddig had taken for ribs and bumps clicked up, and out, and were in fact angular, arched metal legs, clawtipped, fierce. Other distortions on the spearhead shifted, interlaced and spun, cables wired with other cables, fangs dripping acid.
Had the spider been a part of the cavern’s initial design, weaving cables to protect the spear? Had some god crept through the walls and wards, a memory nestled in a spider’s egg, and warped an arachnid embryo to feed on a cold metal world? Was this a security system, or had the buildings’ planner just thought giant metal spiders were cool?
The spider glared down—an effective glare, given the many eyes it glared with. The hiss issued from somewhere within its maxillae.
“Don’t worry about it,” Ley said, and waved the spider off backhanded.
She marched to a door in the spear. The spider scuttled down from the spear-tip, leaving white trails where its claws touched. They were not, Zeddig realized after a moment’s confusion, trails torn by the claws—rather, small pieces of claw rubbed off by the spear-tip, like chalk on slate.
“Shut up,” Ley shouted.
The spider stilled.
“Just here for routine maintenance. In and out before you know it.”
The spider drew back a step, and its red eyes swept each of them in turn. Zeddig felt that gaze heat her skin. She’d been watched by dying angels, in the dead city. This felt close to that—warmer, less ache, fewer tears.
Ley wrenched the door open.
Zeddig edged forward on the catwalk, to peer through.
In the heart of the spear lay a coffin.
That, at least, was built to a human scale. Past the door she saw a crawlspace studded with levers and controls, prayer wheels, dim glyphs, ghostlight paneling. But at its heart lay a simple coffin, open, facing up.
Zeddig knew it was a coffin, because there was a body inside.
The corpse was mummy-wrapped in cables, and a crown of needles lined its skull. Scraps of dark hair and leathered skin clung to bone. Here, at least, there was dust. The mouth was open, possibly screaming. Hard to tell, with tendons and ligaments rotted away. Whatever happened, it happened quick. One hand extended halfway to a Craftwork circle with a needle inside. What had she—Zeddig decided, arbitrarily—wanted to do? When the wards failed and the Wastes closed their fist, what could she want? Would that circle have helped her, or only killed her faster, cleaner?
She did not ask, but Ley spoke anyway: “She was bonded to the system. The wards failed during a launch test, and the Wastes rolled in, and the sensors fed the Waste-gods straight into her brain. She never had a chance. And all she wanted was to fly.”
Ley took the skull by the teeth, and stared into its eye sockets. Dust rained down. Skin shook free. At last, wordless, she released the skull, and reached down through mummifying cables to a cold silver wheel-within-wheel pendant resting on the corpse’s breastbone. The string that once supported it was long gone.
At least, Zeddig thought there must have been a string.
But Ley gripped the pendant with her right hand, the breastbone with her left, and pried. The silver came free with a dull boney crack. Tines sprouted from the pendant, long toothed lines that had spread through the corpse. Ley turned the pendant in the cold light of her hand torch, and the tines curled into a needle, like hermit crab legs seeing their shell. She nodded, and unzipped her jumpsuit.
Zeddig, still operating on the “don’t-touch-anything” protocol, assumed Ley meant to slide the pendant into a pocket, to keep it safe.
Ley pulled down the neck of her tank top and slammed the pendant into her heart.
Zeddig tackled her, too late. Her skull clanged off the tomb’s metal wall.
Ley smiled, then frowned, then touched her cheek as if she had never felt it before. Then she collapsed, curled into a fetal position beside the coffin. Spit leaked through her gritted teeth. Her eyes showed milk white between fluttering lids.
Above, the spider shuffled its feet.
Fuck this.
Zeddig wrapped one arm around Ley, and pulled her toward the door. Ley twitched. Her head struck the wall again, and Zeddig clutched her tighter; Ley’s flailing elbow buried in Zeddig’s stomach, and she winced, but held on.
“Let’s go!” she called, as they reached the catwalk. Unnecessary. The others were moving already—Isaak to help with Ley, Gal toward the hatch. Lights burned on the side of the spear. Foul steam vented into the cavern. Cables burst loose from the spear’s sides. The spider twitched, steadied itself, then set one tender, massive foot upon the gantry. Metal buckled under its weight.
All they had to do was cross the gantry before the spider got murderous, slam the door shut, and hope the thing couldn’t squeeze—
A woman stepped through the open hatch. She was short, and strong-jawed, and she wore a badge and a small peaked hat.
“You’re under arrest,” Lieutenant Bescond said.
Then the Wreckers struck.
Chapter Forty-eight
REACHING THE SPIRE FELT like stepping from a raft to land. The Wreckers blunted the Wastes; Kai felt the cold only as a promise. They marched without hesitation over thin ice. If she flinched, if she ran from the Wreckers, she would drown and freeze at once. But when they passed through the fence around the spire, the yawning threat beneath her faded, and she felt, for a moment, safe.
She wasn’t, but never mind.
Tara knelt by the sphinx, took what pulse she could despite the gaping hole where its head should be, then gloved her hands in shadow and shoved them into the monster’s wounds up to the second knuckle. She frowned at the goo on her fingertips. “They’re an hour ahead of us.”
“Inside, then.” Bescond stared into the sphinx’s neck, down its collapsed gullet. “Funny, being back here.” At first Kai thought she was talking about the sphinx. “It was a hell and a half, building this. Altus wanted to take advantage of the weaker rules in the Wastes; the wards to stabilize the desert enough for building cost a fortune. They planned an industrial park, a bridge between Agdel Lex and a better future . . . somewhere.” She waved vaguely at the sky, then stood. “Shame.”
“I’ll go in first,” Kai said. “You wait out here. Keep a cordon. They won’t surrender the knife unless there’s no way out.”
“Not likely.” Bescond raised one hand. “Wreckers in first.”
The hooded figures flowed, bloomed, pulsed, into the tower. Before Kai could catch them they were all gone save Bescond’s bodyguard, who followed the Lieutenant calmly across the yard.
Kai ran to block her path. “You said you would let me help her.”
“Find her first, if you can,” Bescond said. “You get that knife, I’ll break off pursuit. I never said anything about waiting while you went in alone.”
“You’re cheating.”
“Ms. Pohala, your sister will never give you what you want. You walk into that building, you’re only handing her a hostage—and I’m done negotiating.”
“You can’t,” she said, but did not f
inish that sentence. Bescond cocked her head to one side, skeptical. She was strong, with that wriggly thing on her chest, and bore weapons Kai could only imagine. Besides, the Wrecker stood behind her, tall and wet and cloaked. Kai remembered the touch of those arms, and her guts clenched, and her lungs felt small. She glared into the shadows of its face.
She could call on her gods; she’d never been a fighter, but she knew some tricks, and so did the Lady. But she would not win. Wreckers could descend the tower as quickly as they climbed.
She glanced past the Iskari to Tara, her not-quite ally. The Craftswoman said nothing, but she did look up, across the sands and vacant car park, to the tower. Kai didn’t know Tara well enough to read her. Was that pity? Scorn? Compassion?
When Kai turned back to Bescond, the Lieutenant was waiting. Bescond stood with her knees softly bent, chin pointed, eyes level. Waste-wind ruffled her short dark hair. She carried no tension. She woke every morning with purpose. She lifted weights, and stretched, and when she visited a masseur, he probably complimented her on the looseness of her back and shoulders.
Bescond marched toward the tower, and the Wrecker followed.
Kai did not stop her. Some eight-year-old inside her railed at injustice. But she wasn’t eight anymore, for better or for worse.
“Don’t worry, Ms. Pohala,” Bescond called from the door. “We’ll find your sister soon.”
She closed the door after.
* * *
Oh, Izza thought when she saw the Lieutenant. So this is how it goes to shit.
Then the Wreckers came.
Two rushed past Bescond. Tentacles uncoiled from their sleeves. Gods, they moved so fast.
But Gal was faster.
Raymet reached for the Camlaander’s arm—“Don’t!”—but not fast enough to catch her.
Izza knew street fights. She knew sharp quick blows and knives, seconds at most until someone died, or broke. You could walk away from one-on-two, if you were lucky, if some god loved you, if you had good insurance.
Once, in a Kavekanese back alley, she had seen a goddess’s chosen fight: a flash of silver, a glory of wings, a terrible joyous purpose. She hoped she would never see that again, and sometimes prayed she would.
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