by Tim Akers
Mr. Vaunt the Fehn stared at her, open mouthed. His hands were still hovering over my chest.
"Yes," he said, eventually. "The song of history. Yes. That is what we are."
"And that song has been disrupted," Valentine said, resuming his role as moderator. "Which has never happened, in however many centuries the Fehn have drifted through our fine river. These gentlemen have lost contact with the Mother. It didn't happen until well after the cog-dead virus worked its way through their population. Something else plucked the Mother from their minds."
"Like what?" I prompted.
"It seems that someone, and I assume that it is this Mr. Crane you mentioned, has been screwing around with the Mother Fehn. Tapping it for knowledge. And using that knowledge to get inside the Church. That was the whole point of the attack you participated in. Because of the peculiar way the Fehn communicate, taking control of a large portion of their population gave Crane a kind of back door into the Mother."
"Why would that matter? Why would the Fehn know the first damn thing about the Church of the Algorithm?"
"We know everything," Vaunt said. "We know what this valley looked like when the city was born. What the river tasted like, and why it tastes different now. We know what is upriver, and down. We know why the sky fell, and when it will fall again. All of these things, mortal. And so many more."
"Okay." I cocked an eye at Valentine. He shrugged.
"I have learned that whatever the Fehn are now, they were once something very much like a library. And the Mother, as they call it, is the only fragment of that library left. And while it has gone a little mad, it still collects data, and stories, and preserves them as best it can."
"And Crane? What has he learned from her?"
"Who knows? But you say that Camilla was waiting for him. As if he didn't know she was there? I promise you this. Anyone who has had access to the Mother Fehn would know everything there is to know about Camilla. More even then our little angel knows about herself, I suspect."
This gave me pause. I wasn't sure which was worse; Camilla tricking Ezekiel Crane into freeing her and giving her his power, or Crane tricking Camilla into thinking she had tricked him. Too much tricking. Too much thinking things through.
"So is Camilla free," I asked, "or is Crane manipulating her? And if so, to what end?"
"He was pretty clear about that," Veronica said. "The end of Veridon."
"Which is why I'm not willing to take 'no' for an answer, Mr. Burn." Valentine put his heavy arm around my shoulders. I nearly buckled under the weight. "You are going to solve this problem. I'm going to see to it."
"In case you missed it, she's already kicked me out of the Church once. And she has Wilson. And an entire army of zombified holy men." I shrugged Valentine's arm off and crossed my arms. "I'm happy for your help, I really am. But there's no way we're getting into…"
I stopped, because I had been through another door to the Church of the Algorithm. Going out, but I'm sure it went both ways.
"Mr. Valentine, I'm going to need a favor from your underwater friends," I said. "And maybe a little guidance."
"Of course," he bowed. "You have a way in."
"I do. There's a passage that leads into Camilla's chamber under the Church. Last time I was there, one of the Fehn helped me escape. An old friend." I turned to Mr. Vaunt. "Wright Morgan. Do you know him?"
"He has passed into the histories," he said, the words slurred and wet. "But his story is very old."
"Fair enough. That was almost an answer." I addressed Valentine. "There's an iron suit that sank to the bottom of the river, along with the wreckage of the Bandicoot the other morning. If your friends can get it for me, I think I can get at Camilla."
"And what do you intend to do then?" he asked. "I only ask because I need to protect my investment, here. Not because I don't trust you, Jacob."
"Although you don't," I said.
"Not at all," he confirmed.
"Glad you pulled me out of the river, Valentine, but I kind of feel like you could pick it up a little in the support category."
"Stop screwing around, Jacob. What are you going to do when you get inside?"
"I'm not going to the Church," I said. "Too much resistance there. If what your water-logged friend says is true, Ezekiel isn't even there." I turned to Veronica. "Every time there was a possession, there were a series of pipes. Kind of like organ pipes, only more spread out. Wilson never could figure out what they were doing, but it was clear enough that Crane was somehow projecting himself through them. It seemed a lot like he was reversing the process that is used to record engram-songs. Like he's broadcasting himself, rather than recording the actions of someone else."
"If that's the case, and he's possessing Camilla, shouldn't there be these pipes somewhere in the Church?" Veronica asked.
"Remember when I shot that Elder? The two crows, and the brass cages inside?"
"You think he's broadcasting himself through the Wrights of the Algorithm?" She squinted and got that far away look again. "Rebuilding them somehow. Not a bad idea."
"Are you suggesting we go in and wipe out the entire population of the Church of the Algorithm?" Valentine asked. "Because, while I'm not opposed to the idea in theory, the practice of it could be tricky. Morally."
"Valentine, afraid to carry out a little brutal mass-murder?" I chuckled. "What has become of you, old man? No, you're right. I wouldn't do that. Even if they are possessed by Crane, I'm pretty sure that these cog-dead maintain something of themselves. Wilson and I managed to disrupt Crane's control, and the cog-dead that were around us seemed to snap out of it. Just long enough to beg for help. Once free of Crane's influence, the Wrights of the Algorithm will go back to judging us and being holy for it."
"How did you do it?" Veronica asked. "Disrupt Crane's control?"
"Killed the body he was possessing. Seems to be several levels of control. He seems to maintain a small presence in the minds of the cog-dead. He appeared once, in his house, possessing a dead body, but that was a minor possession. Not a lot of movement, just talking. This last one, though, I could have sworn it was actually him. And the body he was possessing was still alive, unlike the first. So we need to find who he's possessing, right now, before he finishes building those pipes in the bodies of the Algorithm. Because if he manages to project himself in Camilla, we're in a lot more trouble than I can manage."
"So who is it?" Valentine asked.
I turned to the Fehn, who were standing glumly by.
"This is why I'm going to need two things from you guys. I need you to recover the iron suit that I lost when that boat sank. And I'm going to need your forgiveness."
They found it in the wreckage, covered in burned timbers and dead bodies. There were a lot of ships on the floor of the harbor. All of them charred, all of them with their crews still on board. It even shook the Fehn. Nothing shakes a corpse, but this did.
I wasn't anxious to get back in it. Some bad memories had started in this thing. It was just yesterday, but it seemed like so long ago. I stepped into the iron man's embrace and let it seal around me. Again, that metal clank as it shut, a creaking that filled my ears, and then the air around me was as hot as a forge. Valentine watched me seal myself in, then gave me a nod.
"Your girlfriend never came back," he yelled, so I could hear through the thick faceplate.
"Not my girlfriend. And she knows what she needs to do. I trust her." I checked the gauges that lined the collar under my chin. "What are you going to do, while we're in there?"
"Stay out of the way," Valentine said. "Today seems like a good day for a cruise up the river."
"So you fish me out of the river, demand that I accept your assistance, then once we have a plan together you're going to drop me back in the water and head up the river to hide."
"'Hide' is a tricky word. I'm staying clear of the potential damage, Jacob."
"Right," I said. My checks were done. There was nothing left but to get into the r
iver. "Well, Valentine, let me be the first to say that I can appreciate a little situational cowardice."
I stepped into the water and sank, fast and straight. Again, those ghost faces came out of the water. Vaunt, and his smiling, popcorn teeth. Hands gripped the heavily armored shoulders of my suit and pulled me effortlessly forward, into the river. Into the dark.
Chapter Eighteen
The Madness in the River
The Mother Fehn was farther down the river than I expected. Quite near the waterfall, in fact. Near enough that I was nervous. The current tugged at my suit, the great mass of water rushing over me, dragging silt and debris along the river bottom like a sandstorm. Vaunt and his companions would only take me so far. Abruptly, their hands were gone and I was drifting in the current. I looked back and saw their rapidly receding forms. I panicked.
What if they just brought me out here and dropped me in the current? Valentine wasn't tracking my progress. There was no way for him to know that I failed because his associates dropped me off the waterfall, rather than because I took a bullet in some subterranean chamber or something. Maybe I shouldn't have told them that I might have to kill the Mother. My mistake.
The water here was much darker, the silt stirred up by the current clouding my vision. The lights on my helmet were nothing more than cones of cloud in front of my face. It was like walking through a fire. I quickly lost all sense of up or down. All I could tell was that I was falling forward, ever forward, the waterfall sucking me down to its horrible mouth.
My boot bounced off something hard, and I spun head over heels. A brief flash of stone and iron, then I was past it. I thrashed my arms, trying desperately to sink to the bottom of the river, but I could no longer tell which way that was. I finally got my feet aligned to the direction of the current. This meant I was either facing straight down, or straight up. Or sideways, I suppose. I was lost. Completely lost.
Faces flittered past my lights. Crushed heads, mouths gaping in horror, teeth bright in the fog of silt and sludge. I grabbed out for them, and my fingers crushed them like they were china-delicate. The bones turned to dust and joined the current, falling down. I scissored my legs and found purchase. Like a strongman towing a train, I strained against my feet, leaning forward, slipping in the raging current. My hands and feet found the river floor. It was littered with bodies that were barely husks. Ribs and skulls burst when I touched them, only their skin left. The hollow husks of beetles burst out from the crushed remains, slipping downstream like bullets. I was still losing ground, barely able to find any sort of purchase on this terrain. My hands were digging through the hollow remains of the Fehn like plows. Their skin was soft under my hands, and no matter how deeply I thrust into them, all I found were more bodies, more yielding skulls, more beetles. The river was choked with the dead.
Just as I was making enough traction to slow down, my feet fell off the edge. I looked back, expecting to see the bright edge of the waterfall. But no, the current wasn't that strong, not yet. I was on some kind of ledge, the river bed falling away for some distance before slowly sloping up. The water was clearer here. Before I could figure out what was going on I was over the ledge and in open water again. The current eddied down and I sank, the force of the water driving me into the pit. I landed flat, driving the air out of me. I gasped into the burning hot air of the suit, trying to choke down even a breath of that forge. Slowly my breathing calmed, and I forced myself to my hands and knees.
The floor here was just as morbid as it had been before the gap. Crushed bodies around me, the hollow shells of the Fehn scattering from my impact. They were all lying face up, arms reaching back upriver. I looked up, and the beams of my lights played off an iron door, round and black, inset below the ridge I had just fallen over. There was almost no turbulence here, despite the current all around. Unnatural. The Fehn lay here in perfect, dead, peace. They were all reaching for that door, the ones closest to it even dying with their fingers scratching at its cold metal. Trying to get in, trying to get away from the river, from the virus I had apparently unleashed upon them.
Trying to get back to the Mother.
This part I hadn't really planned for. Since the Mother was apparently so ancient, I imagined her living in some cave, deep beneath the river. Hadn't expected something quite so… technological. And this door was some serious technology. There were muted panes of frosted glass in the center, a circular window cut into slices like a pie, that undulated with warm blue light. Something like a piano keyboard lay flush beneath the pie. Everything looked clean and new, not as if it had been lying at the bottom of a river for the last dozen generations. Longer, probably. Unless Crane did something to clean them when he got here. I looked around at all the dead Fehn. No, this door was shut during the attack. Probably as soon as the Mother figured out what was going on, before these Fehn could get inside. Some kind of emergency procedure, like the pressure doors in warships. But if that was true, and Valentine's companion Fehn had somehow been in communication with those inside after the attack, only to lose contact later… how did Crane get in there? Assuming he was in here at all, that I wasn't wasting my time down here while Camilla picked the city apart up top.
I rested my hand against the door. Valentine said that Crane got access to the Mother because he controlled some critical mass of the Fehn, what I had taken to calling the cog-dead. I thought about the rows of them standing along the shoreline beneath Water Street. Maybe I was wrong about them. Maybe they weren't guarding the shoreline, but rather projecting Crane's consciousness into the river. Into this bunker, deep beneath the Reine.
There was a sudden vibration in the door. I jerked my hand back, even though I could barely feel the movement through the iron suit. As soon as I was out of contact with the door, the vibration stopped. Carefully, I returned my hand. The vibration started up again. It was like the scratching of a record, the sound you might hear if a towel was stuffed down the speaker horn. I closed my eyes and listened.
A voice. Voices. It was Crane. I remembered that whenever we were near a possession, his voice would come scratching through those pipes. Which meant he was either in there, projecting out, or he was somewhere else, broadcasting into the bunker.
Neither of which mattered, if I couldn't get this door open.
Traveling hand over hand, I pulled myself along the edge of the door to see if there was a seam between the metal and the rock. In the suit it was impossible to get any tactile sense of my surroundings, but it seemed like the join was smooth. As my hands drifted over the door the vibration-voices continued. I paused when it seemed like they were getting louder. Sure enough, the higher I went, the louder the voices and the clearer their words. By the time I got to the top of the door, the words were clear enough for me to be sure it was Crane talking. Crane, and something else that spoke in perfect monotone. I couldn't understand the nature of their conversation. Something about servitors, and initiation sequences.
My search brought me quite close to the top of the ledge. Just feet above me, the current ripped along. Securing myself to the door with a piston-run grapple, I stuck my fingers up into the current. Quite strong. I really had no idea how I was going to get out of here. But I noticed an odd thing. The suit had a pincer arm in the wrist of the left arm, a slow grapple powered by heavy gears that could seize onto the lip of the door. With the pincer firmly gripping the door and the other up in the current, my whole suit hummed with the monotone voice.
"Calibration is dependent on noetic impression of the operator," it droned. "Sufficient interference will recalibrate, regardless of impression."
I snatched my arm back, and the voice subsided. The rock here was knobbly, offering enough grip to secure the grapple higher up. I set the vise firmly into the rock, then hauled my head over the edge. The current battered me, but I held firm. My lights were dim in the silt, but I looked around. Hard to make anything out upriver. I turned and looked downstream. The pit sloped gently up to the normal level of the river, b
ut other than that there wasn't much to see. I was about to turn back when something reddish and brassy caught my eye. The voices had stopped, but as I was peering downriver at this flicker of light, they returned. With my helmet and lamps over the ledge, I touched my boot to the door. The voice returned, and a surge of power pulsed through the suit. My lamps flared into impossible brilliance for a half breath, then faded.
In that fraction of a second I saw pipes. A dozen of them, arranged into two rows perpendicular to the current, their heights and arrangement staggered in almost random ways. They were a new construction, the rock at their bases raw, their brass untouched by time or river.
Crane had installed them. There was his broadcasting facility. That's how he was getting his voice into the Mother.
I pulled myself back down into the calm waters of the pit. Step by step, I worked my way up the sloped incline toward the pipe array. About halfway up I noticed that the ground clutter of smashed skulls and hollow ribs was mostly clear. Here, the rock floor was a webwork of conduit. It was flush with the rock, and freshly laid. More of Crane's work. I felt nothing when I touched it, though, so it must have been insulated. The voices diminished the farther I got from the door, and the current was dragging on me again, now that I was out of the lee of the pit. This was beginning to look like a bad idea.
A gust of the current lifted me and slammed me back into the rock. I gasped, then slammed the slow-closing grapple into the conduit. Another rope of current got under me, and again I was nearly cast back into the river. The grapple finally closed on the metal and I was able to secure myself. The suit only had the one pincer arm, though. What I wouldn't have done for a drill, or a jacksaw.
If I left my hand grappled and bent my legs, so that I was standing in a threepoint stance, I could clearly see the pipe array. If I had something large enough, a net or a log, I could have thrown them down river and tangled them in the pipes. If they were just brass, the additional drag from the log would have… never mind. It was just hopeful thinking. There was no 'log' accessory in the iron suit. I sighed and craned my neck for a better view.