Heart of Veridon bc-1

by Tim Akers

  “I’ve been meaning to ask you about that,” Wilson said, washing off his hands in a puddle of rain water. “I have some thoughts.”

  “Are they warm, happy thoughts?” I asked. “Thoughts that are likely to reassure me as to our own safety?”

  “Not completely,” he said. “But they may shed some light on what we’re dealing with here.”

  “Then keep them to yourself.” I stretched out on the floor and laced my fingers behind my neck. “I’m limiting myself to good news for a little while.”

  “Let’s hear it, Wilson,” Emily said, shooting me a cross look.

  “Ever since you talked about killing the Summer Girl, I’ve been churning away at what could have happened there. What happened, exactly, to bring about that specific transformation.”

  “I hit her with a hammer,” I said.

  “Not… gods, you’re horrible. Not that transformation. The one where this little girl turns into a murdering angel.”

  “Ah. Continue.”

  “Well, the way that the Summer Girl works, the way all engram singers work, is the maker beetles. That and the queen fetus. The Artificers burn a pattern into the queen, the queen takes up residence in the singer’s internal machinery, and then the beetles burrow their way-”

  “What?” Emily almost shrieked. “They burrow into her body?”

  “You’ve never seen an engram singer?” I asked.

  “No, you filthy noble pig. I grew up watching normal people sing normal songs, that they had memorized or made up or something.”

  “Oh, right. I keep forgetting I was born so much better than you.”

  “Listen, you little fucking-”

  “Okay!” Wilson interjected. “Okay. So the beetles burrow in,” he turned to Emily, “through her machine. There are little tunnels that run through her body. Most of the transformation is facilitated by the machine, but it’s the beetles that do it. The machine is kind of like… like a hive, I suppose. Okay?”

  “It’s still weird.”

  “The point is, there’s a pattern, held by the queen. Sound familiar?”

  “Cogwork,” I said. I suppose I had always known the two practices were similar, I had just never thought about how they were almost identical. “The Wrights have you memorize a pattern, they inject the foetal metal, and the metal makes itself into whatever the pattern dictates.”

  “More or less,” Wilson said. “The pattern is also inscribed onto a coin and put in with the foetus. But without the pattern, the foetal metal is nothing. Just hot metal.”

  “Where do the patterns come from?” Emily asked.

  “The Church,” I answered. “And where do they get them? Who knows. But it’s the foundation of their religion.”

  “So the Artificers and the Church, they both make their technology the same way?”

  “Let’s make no mistakes, Emily.” Wilson sat up straight. “The Wrights only have what they’ve found. Their holy vessels come down the river, and the Wrights catch them and scrounge out any mysteries they can manage. They’re very good at it, and very good at applying what they find, but it’s not creation, really. More like scavenging.”

  “And the Artificers?” I asked. I’d never met anyone willing to talk about the Artificers and their technology. Ever since their Guild had been unofficially disbanded and their role in the city gutted so many years ago, their methods were not a matter of public discourse. If they hadn’t been allowed to continue the minor entertainments like the Summer Girl, most folks wouldn’t even know the Guild had ever existed.

  “The Artificers? Oh, well. They do things differently. Let’s leave it at that,” Wilson said. “The point is, there’s a pattern involved. Every piece of cogwork, from the zepliners to the simplest abacist, has at its heart a holy pattern of the Wrights. Including your PilotEngine, Jacob.”

  “Yeah, well. Maybe they fucked mine up.”

  “Maybe. That’s why I keep trying to get a good read off you, with the beetles. Trying to see the pattern of your heart.”

  “Anyway. The Angel?”

  “Yes, the Angel. You’re sure it was the same one?”

  “Sure as hell,” I said.

  “But you killed that one, or one very much like it, yes? On the Heights?”

  “Right.”

  “And that one, the one you killed on the Heights, the one we saw at the Manor Tomb just today, it’s the same one you saw on the Glory .”

  “He jumped off, just before we crashed.”

  Wilson stood up and, hunching over, began to pace the room. “Jumped off. Just before you crashed. And Jacob, you found this other fellow, this marine, in the Artificer’s rooms?”

  “Wellons. Yeah, but he’d been dead for a while.”

  “Do you think the Summer Girl was on the Glory?” he asked.

  “No, of course not.”

  “Of course not. Do you think Wellons was?”

  “I didn’t…” I stopped. “You’re saying the Angel was Wellons?”

  “At one point. And then, for whatever reason, it left Wellons and became the Summer Girl.”

  “What? How?” Emily asked.

  “I don’t have an answer for how.” Wilson stopped pacing and pulled the Cog from his pocket. “But I have an idea about why.”

  He set the Cog on the ground near my feet, then crouched over his bag and produced a glass jar that jingled as he moved it. He unscrewed the lid and rummaged through the contents, then set what looked like a coin on the ground next to the Cog.

  “What do you see?” he asked.

  I sat up. Emily and I leaned closer to the two objects. The Cog I knew. The coin was a flat metal disk, dull, with lines etched into its surface and cog-teeth along a quarter of its perimeter. It looked old.

  “Algorithm,” I said, pointing to the coin. “That’s one of the Church’s pattern-coins.”

  “For cog, yes. This is what serves as the groundwork for all cogwork. Put one of these in your mouth, inject the foetus, and something grows in you.” He nudged the coin around, examining the pattern. “In this case, a musical instrument that replaces your lungs. Or something. I forget. The point is, it’s the blueprint for cogwork. What else?”

  I looked more closely at the coin, then the Cog. “I don’t-”

  “Pattern,” Emily said.

  Wilson pointed at her. “Pattern. Yes.” He held up the Cog. “This is a very big, very complicated pattern coin.”

  “My gods,” Emily said. “For what?”

  Wilson shrugged. “I don’t know. But we could find out.”

  “I’d rather not,” I said. “So, Marcus and Wellons and whoever else was on that list stole this from the city, and now that angel is chasing them?”

  “City?” Emily asked. “Which city.”

  “I didn’t tell her,” Wilson said. “Yet.”

  “We found a map, at the Tomb place. It shows a city, huge, way downriver.”

  “Like another Veridon?”

  “Nothing like Veridon. Veridon’s a damn outhouse compared to his place. I don’t know what it is.”

  “Okay. One thing at a time.” Wilson pointed to me and shook his head. “I don’t think so, by the way. I don’t think they made it all the way to that city. But I think that’s where they were going. They just ran into some trouble.”

  “The Angel?”

  “The Angel. Maybe he was a scout, maybe he lived well outside the city. If they’d gotten all the way there, I don’t think we’d be having this conversation. I think there’d be a whole swarm of those things turning Veridon to mulch.”

  “Shit,” I said. I meant it, too. Veridon had been tough on me, but it was home. People here I cared about. Streets and buildings I’d known my whole life. “So, what? They found an outlying building, stole the Cog, and then the angel caught them and chased them.”

  “Better than that. Or much, much worse. Depends on your point of view. I think they found that angel, killed him, and stole the body. Or at least part of the body.”
>
  “Why would they do that?” Emily asked.

  “Question for Marcus. Or Wellons. Maybe that Sloane guy you met. But I think they‘ve done it before.”

  “Stolen body parts from angels?” Emily asked.

  “Where does the cogwork come from, Emily? Where do they get their patterns? They aren’t making them up, that’s for sure.” Wilson was pacing again, agitated. He stabbed his finger out at us. “That’s for damn sure. They’re getting it from somewhere else. What’s to say that this isn’t the source?”

  “We should ask the Church,” I joked. “I’m sure they’ll be very forthcoming on that.”

  “Not the Church,” Wilson said. “But the people on your list. Angela Tomb. That Sloane guy. They’ll know.”

  “Yeah, well. But Angela doesn’t seem much like talking. And Sloane? I’ll ask him, if I find him. But what makes you say they stole a part of the body?”

  “Because now we have it. And they want it back. And so does the original owner.”

  “The Cog?”

  “Yeah. I think this is nothing less than that angel’s pattern. I think it’s his damn heart.”

  “So what happened with Wellons?” I asked. We had decided that whatever the Cog was, we had to keep it out of the hands of the Council. For now at least. I wanted to know more about what we were doing, what we were handing over.

  “For whatever reason, the angel seems to need a host. I’m going to assume that has something to do with this,” Wilson said, holding up the Cog. “And so far he’s only infected people who have been heavily cogged. You said Wellons was an assault trooper, right?”

  “According to his uniform, yeah. And those guys are metalled up to the balls.”

  “Lovely terminology. And the Summer Girl, we know, had the beetle hive implanted. None of the other Artificers would have had any modifications, so she was the only choice.”

  “Infect? Like he’s some kind of disease?” I asked.

  “More like a parasite,” Wilson answered. His eyes had a far away look, and his voice was drifting into university professor territory. What had he done with his time, before his days as a black-market doctor? “Takes over the body and the mind, remakes it. If the angels really are the source of Veridon’s cogwork, then who knows how advanced they are. What they’re capable of.”

  “That’s creepy,” I said. “But isn’t that Church theology? That the early Wrights were able to heal the dying Camilla, and in return she gifted them with the first cogwork?”

  Wilson shrugged. “Seems a convenient story, but maybe. Maybe.”

  “So it infected Wellons,” I said. “Then followed Marcus back to the city. For whatever reason it had to leave him, then took over the Summer Girl. So what happened when I killed her?”

  “You tell me. What happened?”

  “She… fell apart, I guess. It looked like the maker beetles, leaving her body, splashing down into the rain.”

  Wilson nodded. “And it might have been something very similar. Maybe the cog-heart serves as his pattern, holds him together. And he needs the host body just for the pattern in their implanted cogwork. Something to hold him together. Disrupt that, and the thing falls apart.”

  “And then what? How does it find a new host?”

  “Goes dormant? Reforms somehow, and latches on to someone new? This is all just theory, Jacob.”

  “But we saw it again, so we know it happened. Somehow the thing reformed.”

  “A new host,” Emily said. “Who was at the party?”

  “Pilots,” I said. “Lots of Pilots.”

  “There you go.” Wilson spread his hands and grimaced. “If cogwork is necessary for infection, Pilots are pretty close to the perfect candidate. If one of your Corpsmen wandered down into the gardens, maybe looking for you, they could have stumbled into the angel’s scattered corpse and gotten infected without knowing what happened.”

  I looked down at my palms. “How did I not get infected?”

  “Who knows? Maybe when you disrupted the body it needs some time to spin up again. Let’s just say you got lucky, and you’ll be more careful in the future.”

  Emily had been quiet, standing a little ways away from us. I turned to her.

  “So what are we going to do now?” I asked her. When she didn’t say anything, didn’t even seem to hear me, Wilson stepped in.

  “Badge is after you, that thing in the sky is after you.” He shrugged. “Sounds like maybe the Family Tomb is after you, too. We’re going to need a better place to hide.”

  “What’s wrong with here?” Emily asked. She seemed distracted.

  “Not deep enough. Too close to the Families, to the centers of the Badge’s power. Too many crowds. People here don’t love the Badge, but if they’re serious about finding you, well. Someone will talk. Enough money and enough threats, people will talk.”

  “So where do we go?” I asked. I stood and stretched my back. My thighs felt like lead, and my chest was stiff. “I can’t go far, or fast.”

  “I have some ideas. We’ll wait until tonight, until you’re a little better.”

  “I feel pretty good right now. I just don’t want to push it. And with that thing in the air…”

  “I think the Tomb set you up,” Emily said. Wilson and I stopped and turned to her.

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “I think she set you up. That bit about the Badge interrupting, I don’t think that was part of the plan, but I think she set you up.”

  I walked carefully over to the wall and sat down with my back against it. “What makes you say that, Em? What do you know about this?”

  “Nothing. I mean, nothing solid. But the Cog missing like that? It hadn’t been there long, like they were waiting for it to show up. And they had to know you’d come for it.”

  “Maybe. But that’s hardly evidence.”

  “And on the Heights too, I think.”

  I tensed up. I’d been wondering about the Heights, what Emily knew about that job, really.

  “That job wasn’t from Valentine, Jacob.”

  “Okay,” I said, carefully.

  “I wanted to make sure you’d take the job. I knew you wouldn’t turn down work from the old clockwork.”

  “That was risky. If he found out, if I said anything to him about it. A real chance you took there, Em.”

  “The drugs, with Prescott, that was his. But the music box wasn’t.”

  “That got Prescott killed, you know.”

  “Yeah. I know.”

  I flexed my hands, loosened my shoulders. “So. Who did the job come from, then?”

  “I don’t know. A guy, he looked… I don’t know. Noble.”

  “Like he was a Family guy. Someone’s important son?”

  “Right. He gave me the box and told me it needed to go to Tomb. At the party. He said you needed to do the job.”

  “You were really looking out for me there, Em.” I kept my voice as even as I could. “Really watching my back.”

  “Sorry. I’m sorry. You’re pretty good at handling yourself. I figured it was some Council thing. Some… political statement.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “So. Angela Tomb gets me up on the Heights, then tries again at the Manor.” I remembered the troop of soldiers outside my door up on the Heights. I hadn’t given that much thought, what with all the bloodletting and falling out of windows. What had they been doing there? They couldn’t have found Prescott or the Artificers, then rushed to arrest me on basic assumption. “So what does that mean?”

  “I don’t know.” Emily shrugged. “Honestly. I could be wrong about the whole thing.”

  “Well. We’ll see. Anything else, Emily? Anything I should know?”

  She shook her head, kind of sadly. “Nothing else.”

  “Where does that leave us? Angela Tomb wants me alive, then she shoots me.” I leaned over and took the Cog from Wilson and held it in my palm. “And lots of people want this. How many groups are we talking about? Tomb. Whoever’s pus
hing the Badge around from inside the Council. Whoever paid Pedr to break into my room. Someone sent that gun up to the Heights, that wasn’t Angela. Sloane, we know he visited Emily after I left the Cog with her. And his name’s on that list, along with Angela, Marcus, and Wellons.” I looked up. “Lotta folks interested in us.”

  “What do we do?” Wilson asked.

  “I don’t know. Hide some more. Dig up some information about this thing. Why everyone wants it. Figure out who we’re up against, and why.” I slipped the Cog into my coat pocket and stood up. “But first, we hide.”

  Chapter Nine

  The Church is an Engine

  We moved at night, down the Prior Grosse and into the Long March wards. I was careful of the sky, dashing between buildings and staying to the narrow alleyways. We followed the terraces down towards the Reine, where the streets covered generations of pipework and history. We went down to the cisterns.

  Walking through the old avenues reminded me of home. We were uncomfortably close to the Burn family grounds. Tomb was near the top of Veridon, but great old Burn made his lands farther from the thick walls of the old city. I saw the eternal lights of Tower Burn looming in crimson stained glory over the other buildings on its terrace. I hurried on.

  Emily drew up beside me. She had her hands in her pockets. Wilson was a shadow behind us.

  “Jacob, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean for it to go like this.”

  I kept my eyes forward. “Sure. You had your reasons for doing things.”

  “No, I mean it.” She plucked at the sleeve of my coat, an irritated gesture. “Don’t get all noble on me. It was a gamble, but I figured you were up to it. I figured that if the Tombs were involved, well.” She shrugged. “That’s just the sort of job you were born for, isn’t it?”

  “Born and raised. But next time you gamble with my skin, lady, maybe let me know.”

  “You might have turned down the job.”

  “I might have. But I might have gone in better prepared. When did it occur to you that Tomb might be trying to get a hold of me, Em? When those men came looking for me, in your office? When the Badge chased me out of your apartment?” I turned to look at her. Her face was pale, like winterglass. “Was it when you sent me into the Manor Tomb, to fetch that Cog?”