The Wonder Engine

by T. Kingfisher

  Were there guards in the room with the corpses? No. There were not. No one guards the dead.

  “Another grave-gnole takes the bodies somewhere,” said Grimehug. “From the room where a grave-gnole drops them. This grave-gnole says that grave-gnole says there is a…” He looked to Sweet Lily, barked a question.

  “Hole,” said Sweet Lily. “Or is a…long hole?”

  “Trench,” said Grimehug. “Metal trench?” He shrugged at Slate and Learned Edmund.

  “A chute of some kind, perhaps,” said Learned Edmund.

  “Maybe, book man. Inside of warehouse is big, goes down. Thing in it. No words for thing at bottom. No, some words. Stupid words.” Grimehug’s lips curled up and he growled something, almost directly at the grave-gnole. Breath-swipe stared at the ground, not speaking.

  “Please tell us what they’re saying, Grimehug,” said Slate. She was getting very uncomfortable with his treatment of the grave-gnole, but she didn’t dare alienate their only source of information.

  Grimehug groaned. “Metal spiderwebs. Bone or clay thing. Bone tails hooked together.”

  “The wonder-engine,” said Learned Edmund. “It’s all right. They—” he attempted the grave-gnole’s name again “—can’t be expected to have words for that. Most human languages don’t.”

  “Humans can’t smell,” muttered Grimehug.

  That seemed to end the interview. Slate looked to Grimehug. “I’d pay an informant,” she said. “Can I pay the grave-gnole?”

  “Do whatever you want, Crazy Slate.” He looked surly, then unbent a bit. “Pay Sweet Lily, though. A rag-and-bone gnole did good work.”

  Slate pulled out the same amount she had paid Sparrow in the Grey Church and held it out to Sweet Lily. “Sweet Lily, what is fair to pay this grave-gnole?”

  Sweet Lily plucked the coins neatly out of her palm. “A rag-and-bone gnole pays this grave-gnole,” she said, and turned to the grave-gnole. Money exchanged hands, though Slate couldn’t see how much.

  Sweet Lily said something in gnole-speech to Breath-swipe. They looked up, startled, then glanced at Slate, then back to Sweet Lily.

  She leaned in and swiped her tongue across the grave-gnole’s muzzle. Grimehug grunted, but didn’t protest. The grave-gnole’s ears went up and forward and they seemed to stand up a bit taller.

  Then Sweet Lily turned away and led them back out of the Gnole Quarter.

  “A gnole didn’t need to go that far,” muttered Grimehug.

  “Is rag-and-bone gnole business, not job-gnole business,” snapped Sweet Lily, the angriest Slate had heard her speak.

  Grimehug accepted this rebuff with a grunt. After a moment, he leaned over and groomed Sweet Lily’s ears. She made a small, grumpy purr.

  “Grimehug…” said Slate.

  He cocked his ear at her.

  “Your people go along with the clocktaurs to see where they’re going, don’t they? It’s not actually to make money.”

  Grimehug’s ears flicked sharply, then he gave her a rueful grin. “Big damn clocktaurs, a gnole likes to know, hey? Maybe some gnoles don’t want to go to the wrong place, get squashed in a human war just when a gnole’s getting comfortable.”

  Slate nodded.

  “A gnole doesn’t complain about the money, though.”

  “A gnole wouldn’t,” said Slate dryly.

  There was a logical extension to this, too. She knew it perfectly well. Grimehug was staying with them for reasons that had nothing to do with, as Grimehug claimed, how swanky the inn was.

  We’re paying quite a lot of money to the gnoles. It’s worth their time. But they’re also watching to see what we do. Grimehug’s…if not a spy, at least an informant.

  The only thing that she was sure of was that Grimehug was working for himself, or perhaps the gnoles, not for the government of Anuket City.

  Because if he wasn’t, we’d all be rotting in a cell by now.

  “Grimehug?”

  “Yeah?”

  “You know we’re trying to stop the clocktaurs.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Your people make money on the clocktaurs.”

  Grimehug paused. Light glittered off his dark eyes. “Don’t twist whiskers too hard, Crazy Slate,” he said. “Grave gnoles make money on clocktaurs. Rag-and-bone gnoles don’t make any. Job gnoles don’t make much.” He tilted a hand back and forth. “Clocktaurs wreck a city, maybe no gnole makes any money.”

  Does that mean they won’t get in our way?

  They haven’t so far. They’re helping us.

  Are the grave gnoles making too much money compared to the higher castes? Do they want to return the system to normal?

  “Relax, Crazy Slate,” said Grimehug, reaching up and patting her arm. “A gnole’s your friend. A gnole tells you if a human’s about to do something to a gnole won’t like, hey?”

  And with that, she had to be content.

  The humans entered the inn and climbed the stairs, the gnoles dispersed, and Slate was left wondering if they had learned anything, or everything, or nothing at all.

  Twenty-Two

  When they returned, Caliban was alone in the main room of their suite, surrounded by bits of mail and plate.

  “What happened here?” said Slate. “It looks like an explosion in an armor factory.”

  “I was cleaning my armor.”

  “If you do that too much, you’ll go blind. Where’s Brenner?”

  “He went out.”

  Slate’s eyes narrowed. “Following us?”

  “He said not.”

  She dropped into a chair. Learned Edmund held the window open for Grimehug. Sweet Lily had returned to the hotel as well, but had declined to climb up a drainpipe to join them.

  “How come you let him go out without an escort?”

  “So far as I am aware, no one wants to hang him from a crow cage.”

  “Give it time,” said Slate. “Brenner’s talented like that.”

  Learned Edmund took out a sheet of foolscap. “I have to write this down while it is fresh in my mind,” he said. “Mistress Slate, will you stay until I have finished, so that you may check over my writings?”

  “Sure.” Slate made a mental note to find Ashes Magnus and shake her hand. She couldn’t imagine the dedicate of a month ago asking Slate to read his notes.

  Caliban knelt down in front of her. Slate had a horrible fear that he was about to apologize for something, or start my liege-ing at her, but instead he untied her boots.

  “I take back everything mean I’ve said about you recently,” she said, as he pulled them off.

  “What, all of it?”

  “Well, the bits where I swore, anyway.”

  He gazed at her socks, formerly his. “I’m not getting these back, am I?”

  “Not until I’m done with the shoes.”

  Grimehug stretched out on the floor in his badgerskin-rug pose. Caliban went back to fixing his chainmail, which involved pliers. Learned Edmund’s pen scratched across the paper.

  It was warm and oddly peaceful. Slate curled up in the chair with her legs over the arm and felt herself drifting. She watched Caliban bent over the heap of metal in his lap, his hands busy with individual links. The oil lamp cast warm golden light over the side of his face. Slate watched his brows furrow and smooth, over and over, as he fitted tiny lengths of wire into the mail links and used a pair of tongs to force them closed.

  I just confirmed that the gnoles are dragging corpses into a warehouse, probably to be turned into rampaging killing machines. I’ve probably figured out a way into the warehouse, and it’s nasty. And I…seem to be falling asleep…

  She woke when Brenner came through the door. Someone had tucked a blanket over her. Probably no need to ask who.

  “Where’ve you been?” she asked, sitting up and yawning.

  “I can see you’ve been worrying yourself sick about it.”

  She yawned again. “It was a worry-nap. You selling us out to the enemy?”

>   “I tried, but nobody’s got enough money.” He dropped into another chair. “No, I was investigating the river approach.”

  “And?”

  “We’re not getting in that way. It’s built out over the river. Big metal grates down into the water, and I mean big. It’d be hours of treading water with a hacksaw to get through them, and I don’t know if we’d even be in the damn building at that point, or if we’d still have layers of floor to go through.”

  Caliban let out a sigh that almost sounded like relief.

  Probably worried about sinking in all that armor…

  “And the walls?” he asked.

  “Unless you got a siege engine you’re not using, it’s not gonna happen.”

  Slate groaned. “How thoughtless of them.”

  She drummed her fingers on her thigh. There was an obvious way in, but she didn’t like it at all.

  Brenner met her eyes across the room. He was probably thinking the same thing.

  “You thinking what I’m thinking, darlin’?”

  “You know I am.”

  “Think we can get the gnoles to go along with it?”

  “Let’s see if we can figure something else out,” she said. “Which I suppose means back to the Grey Church for us.”

  Caliban winced, but didn’t object. Slate limped into the hall and her bedroom, to find that Grimehug had already beaten her there.

  * * *

  There are no demons in Anuket City.

  The words had been rolling around Caliban’s mind, popping up at odd intervals, like a fragment of poetry or a line from a song. He could not get them out of his head.

  There are no demons in Anuket City.

  There had to be. Sooner or later, there were demons everywhere.

  He leaned his head back against the rim of the bathtub and tried to clear his mind. Hot water helped him think. Always had, ever since he had been very young and living on his father’s farm. It was strange, stony, largely useless ground, but it had natural hot springs, and Caliban could always go and sit in the hot water and think.

  He had been the youngest of four brothers. His mother died not long after bearing him. He grew up learning to take a beating and to keep his temper so he didn’t take a bigger one. In that part of the country, a child sent to the temple meant a year of not paying taxes, and when he was nine years old and the harvest worse than usual, Caliban was tithed, or sold, or whatever you wanted to call it.

  The Forge God had been set to take him, ironically enough. But a visiting champion of the Dreaming God had been at that god’s temple and she had looked at him with cold gray eyes and informed the temple that she would be taking him instead. The Forge God’s priests hadn’t thought it was worth fighting over a skinny nine-year-old of no particular merit, and had sent him along with only token haggling.

  In the Dreaming God’s temple, Caliban had blossomed. Given enough food for the first time in his life, he shot up taller than any of his brothers and filled out broader. Fearing neither pain nor farm animals, as it turned out, went a long way towards making one useful as a demonslayer. The year he turned seventeen, the Dreaming God poured into his soul like hot metal and forged him into a weapon.

  The god picked only the good, the calm, the just. After a few years in the Dreaming God’s service, Caliban suspected that He also only picked the uncomplicated.

  Knight-Champions lived almost sybaritic lives, by some standards. It was part of the bargain that no one ever talked about. You had clean clothes and soft beds and good food. You were sought after by men and women (and Caliban had had both in his time). You were lionized and praised and admired. In return, you trained with the sword every day and you were sent out over and over again, to fight things that gripped your soul like oily smoke and licked your heart with black metal tongues.

  Demons tried to tempt you. It was their nature. If you desired power or knowledge or any one of a hundred complex desires, the demons had a foothold to work on you. So the ranks of the Knight-Champions were swelled by those who wanted nothing more than to be useful, to be appreciated, to kill demons, to have hot water and decent food and a warm bed at the end of the day.

  Because you had everything you desired, you were very hard to tempt. So you tried to kill the demons and the demons tried to kill you and most days you won and one day they’d win instead. There weren’t that many old Knight-Champions. Less than half of the people that Caliban had trained with as a novice were still alive.

  On the other hand, you did get hot water. And they didn’t begrudge you any of it.

  He sank a little deeper into the tub, which wasn’t very deep at all. It simply wasn’t large enough to accommodate his frame. (Slate could probably have swum laps in it.)

  Well, it was likely for the best. Caliban could no longer bear to have his face submerged. Even a hot towel while he shaved made him twitchy. He could not remember the exorcisms clearly, but his body remembered enough.

  Mostly he remembered the cold. The hot water helped with that.

  There had been times, in the prison cell, when he thought that he would never be warm again. Even now, there seemed to be a core of ice in his bones that woke sometimes and sent chill fingers outward through his flesh.

  There are no demons in Anuket City.

  There had to be. It didn’t make sense for there not to be. Demons were attracted to humanity the way that wolves were attracted to sheep. Presumably they’d be just as interested in gnoles.

  Why weren’t there any demons here?

  Was something keeping them out? Driving them away? He hadn’t felt anything, but his demon was keeping a very low profile these days, as if the incident with the rune-demon had traumatized it. Caliban was not complaining about that.

  It would be a good thing, if there were no demons. Oh Dreaming God! It would be a glorious thing. A place on earth where they don’t need me. Someplace that I knew would be safe.

  The idea was incredibly seductive, the embodiment of all that the Dreaming God’s temple worked for…and apparently traveling with Brenner and Slate and their suspicious minds had rubbed off on him, because all Caliban could think was:

  But if the demons aren’t here, where are they?

  * * *

  “Politics,” said Slate. “I hate politics.”

  “Doesn’t everyone?” said Caliban.

  “Presumably politicians enjoy it,” said Learned Edmund.

  “I don’t even know why we’re bothering,” said Slate. Her voice was somewhat muffled because she was lying facedown on the floor, where she had collapsed dramatically a few minutes earlier.

  Brenner came in, nudged her with his boot, and said, “Are you dead?”

  “Yes. I am dead.”

  “Can I have your stuff?”

  “None of it will fit you. Except maybe these boots.”

  “I take it,” said Caliban, setting aside the bit of chain he’d been working on, “that this last round did not go well.”

  “It went great,” said Slate, propping her head up in her hands. “We’re actually getting somewhere. It’s just where we’re getting is useless.”

  “Oh?”

  “The Senators who started the war aren’t even in charge any more,” said Slate darkly.

  Caliban raised an eyebrow. “They aren’t?”

  “No. Two of them turned up dead and a couple retired.”

  “Turned up dead?”

  Slate flapped a hand at him. “Don’t get sidetracked on that. Senators turn up dead all the time. It’s one of the acceptable forms of retirement here.”

  “My god.”

  “Yeah, don’t go into politics in Anuket City unless you like power enough to die for it. Anyway, the point is that those people we were trying to find, who wanted a war?”

  “Yes?”

  “Somebody found them first.”

  Caliban digested this. “Is that good?”

  “Hell if I know.”

  “So if they’re dead…why is there still a wa
r?”

  Slate collapsed facedown on the floor again. “Politics,” she said. “It doesn’t make any sense. People do the stupidest shit and you want to scream that it’s against their own interests and you never know if they’re playing some deep game you don’t know about or if they’re really just that stupid. Right now, I think we’re having a war because we’ve already got a war, so we might as well keep it.”

  Caliban nodded slowly. “They have paid most of the costs already, have they not? And the people who have learned to profit from the war will wish to continue.”

  “Yeah. I mean, all the war is costing them is clocktaurs. And trade with the Dowager’s city, which is probably why at least one of the two turned up dead. And meanwhile everybody else is being very, very nice to Anuket City, so for all I know, it’s still profitable. Hell, not having Archenhold threatening to secede every ten minutes might be worth it all by itself.”

  “Wars are harder to stop than to start,” said Learned Edmund cautiously.

  Slate pointed at him without lifting her head. “Also, what he said.”

  Brenner lit a cigarette and stared into the smoke. “So the problem, then…”

  “Yeah.” Slate sighed into the floor. “Yeah. Now who the hell are we supposed to kill?”

  Twenty-Three

  Caliban was about as subtle as a warhorse in an apothecary shop, a fact that he was well aware of. If he hadn’t been aware of it, Brenner would have told him. He discarded the notion of a disguise at once. If he wandered around looking suspicious and asking questions about demons, people were bound to notice.

  Instead he mended the burn marks in his cloak, straightened his back, and swept out as the Knight-Champion of the Dreaming God, slayer of demons, who obviously had a pressing interest in demonic activity. He simply hoped that nobody recognized him as any specific Knight-Champion who might have been incarcerated recently for possession and mass murder.

  It was a very strange city. He couldn’t help but compare the streets to the broad, tree-lined avenues of the capitol. Anuket City looked old, as if it had grown up on the ruins of a dozen other cities, which it had picked apart and built with or occasionally carted off for scrap. Ancient stones formed foundations for modern-looking brick. Streets meandered and twisted back on themselves, or dead-ended into walls. Humble tenement buildings sported monstrous gargoyles from earlier incarnations as churches and cathedrals.