The Wonder Engine

by T. Kingfisher

  “Of course you do,” said Slate. “You’re very smart.” Come on, last one, just click, just…

  The fletching of Brenner’s bolt was slowly emerging from the side of Amadai’s face now. The corpse’s skin split even farther, a jagged line running up the side of the skull. Another bone needle appeared, tapping at the split, and Slate was probably going completely out of her head now, there was no other explanation, but she would swear that the needle was exasperated by the damage—Do you see what I have to put up with here? This won’t repair itself!

  The lock did not so much click as clank open. The heavy metal bolt groaned loose and Slate hauled down on it and…nothing happened.

  The sheer weight of the chain held the bottom link pinned to the top of the metal bar. She’d have to slide the padlock sideways to knock it loose.

  She tried to stand up, to get both hands around the lock and pull, and Amadai slashed at her with two sets of arms.

  “…not…ssssso…eassssy…isss it?” he breathed, and then burst into another eerie wail of laughter.

  Slate nearly fell off the wonder-engine’s back, swinging out of the way of the corpse. She clung to the iron collar with both hands while Amadai jittered and twisted above her.

  He can’t get any farther down. The chain’s not long enough. I’m out of his way. I’m safe as long as—

  She heard the ponderous footfalls of a clocktaur approaching from behind.

  Can it reach me? Oh god, surely it can’t reach me?

  Do I really want to find out?

  “Shoot it!” she screamed at Brenner. “Shoot it!”

  “I might hit you!”

  “I’ll take the chance!”

  Caliban would have argued with her. Fortunately, Caliban didn’t have the crossbow.

  The first bolt went by Amadai’s shoulder and tore a line through the corpse’s bicep. This interested Amadai enough to swing up a few feet and peer eyelessly at Brenner.

  It also missed Slate’s face by about three inches.

  “Brenner!”

  “It didn’t hit you!”

  “No, I guess not…”

  The next bolt went neatly into Amadai’s head. The corpse began to swing angrily back and forth.

  Slate hauled herself back up on the wonder-engine’s back and looked down, to see that the clocktaur was just standing there, doing nothing.

  Nothing was good. Nothing was just fine. She would prefer they do nothing, really.

  A second clocktaur appeared behind the first and began ponderously climbing atop it.

  Slate scrambled backward.

  “That’s bad,” she muttered. “That’s really bad. I don’t approve of that at all.”

  The chain slammed down beside her and began to pile up. Links smashed into her thighs with bruising force. She stifled a shriek.

  “Slate!”

  “I’m fine!” she shouted. That was mostly a lie, but she hadn’t felt a bone break, so that was something.

  The climbing clocktaur slipped and fell heavily. Bits of gear flew off the bottom one. The clocktaur regained its footing with difficulty and began to climb.

  More chain fell. Brenner was clearly distracting it pretty well, or…

  She risked a glance up. Great god, Caliban was leaning dangerously far out over the railing, poking at Amadai with his sword. He could almost reach, and it was clearly infuriating Amadai.

  Brenner put another bolt in the corpse’s face.

  Slack. All she needed was a tiny bit of slack. As long as Amadai was up above, slack was what she had.

  Slate grabbed one of the links across her legs and dragged it off. She could feel first cloth, then bits of skin catching under the rough metal and snarled in pain.

  Doesn’t matter. Doesn’t matter. If I can get the lock loose, I don’t care if my leg comes loose with it.

  The clocktaur had gotten both front limbs up on its fellow’s back and was working its way forward. They teetered together in a strange, impossible parody of mating.

  Slate found the lock and caught it with both hands.

  Forty-Six

  The weight of the slack chain was easily two or three times her own, but she didn’t have to lift it all. Just one link and the two or three attached to it, just enough to get the bar of the padlock loose…

  Things tore in her back and her wrists, things that would hurt like hell later—if there was a later—but she drove forward, feet braced on the iron collar, and threw the padlock off.

  It clattered loose and fell to the ground, far below.

  The chain began to move. She didn’t know if Amadai was descending deliberately or if the weight of the chain was not enough to balance out the weight of the corpse and his device. She decided not to risk it.

  “Amadai!” she screamed. “Amadai, you dead shit, I’m talking to you!”

  “…whhhat….”

  “Nobody’s going to write about you! You’re an idiot! The order’s laughing at you!”

  The corpse began to descend. Slow, then faster and faster, and then the loose end of the chain whipped by so close to Slate’s face that it nearly took her head off.

  Now that would have been ironic…

  Amadai slashed at her. An ivory spine slashed across her back, tearing through fabric and scoring a line across her flank. She barely felt it.

  At this point, if it doesn’t take out my kidneys, I don’t care any more.

  The corpse realized something was wrong and tried to rise. Slate had the impression of a spider trying to scramble up a line of silk, but it was too late, too late, the lock was breached, the chain was loose…

  Brother Amadai smashed into the wonder-engine, shedding gears and bone. The corpse screamed, then bounced off and fell the rest of the way to the floor. Iron sang as it whipped through the pulley overhead and then fell, straight down.

  Slate threw herself toward the back of the wonder-engine. The machine shook as the chain struck it, then that, too bounced off and slid to the floor.

  * * *

  There was a long and terrible silence.

  Caliban thought for a moment that he had gone deaf. Amadai had been screaming as he fell and then it cut off abruptly, without even an echo.

  Two clocktaurs, on the far side of the engine, paced toward the fallen man. Without stopping, without pausing, the nearer one stepped on him, trampling the corpse and the bone spines underfoot.

  The other drew back one massive, squared-off arm and struck the other one across the back.

  Ivory crashed against ivory. The struck clocktaur reared and kicked outward, slamming its attacker against the wonder-engine.

  The climbing clocktaur, in the meantime, had stopped climbing and began trying to smash the head off the one beneath it. Its victim reared back, throwing it off onto its side.

  “Why are they fighting?” shouted Slate, trying to find something to cling to.

  “They’re demons!” Caliban shouted back. “Demons hate each other. And they’ve all come unbound now! All the demons are loose!”

  “Yes,” breathed Brenner in his ear. “They are.”

  The assassin was standing much too close, close as a lover. Caliban jerked back, startled. “Brenner? What…”

  Brenner smiled, and something else smiled out at Caliban through his eyes, something ancient and terrible and…familiar.

  The rune-demon’s voice was changed by passing through Brenner’s throat, but Caliban would have known it anyway.

  “Remember me, shining one?”

  * * *

  “How long?” said Caliban, lifting his sword. And then, answering his own question, “Since you killed the old rune. Of course. You possessed Brenner then, didn’t you?”

  “So close,” purred the demon. “So close, but not quite, Caliban-whose-flaw-is-pride. Did you think that you were the only one worth seducing?”

  Caliban remembered kneeling in the darkness inside his mind, with the demon wreathed like smoke around him, trying to get in.

  And
I never even wondered if it tried to seduce Brenner as well. Because of course I was so much more desirable as a host, why would it even try?

  He laughed, almost inaudibly, at himself. At his pride. Of course.

  That was why my demon has been so quiet, why it stopped coming out when I slept. It’s been trying to avoid notice. Even a dead demon is frightened of one that strong.

  And he had been foolish enough to be grateful for it. Only rage and terror had dragged it up, and it had fled as quickly as it had come.

  Meanwhile, the rune-demon had been curled in Brenner’s mind this entire time, alive and waiting. With a willing host, so that it did not need to puppet the assassin’s body and risk being found out.

  And now, with the Clockwork Boys rendered harmless, it was no longer in danger of the assassin being devoured by the tattoo.

  Brenner had a knife.

  No. Don’t fool yourself. The demon has a knife.

  “You could have just walked away,” said Caliban. “I would never have known.”

  “Precisely,” purred the demon. “What good is an enemy who doesn’t know that he’s been defeated?”

  Ah. Of course. Perhaps he’d stung its pride a little too.

  Caliban swallowed. Could he bind another demon so soon? Could he bind this demon?

  He had tried, in the rune’s nest, and failed. But it had been at full strength then, riding a shaman of ancient power, in a body that it had known for many years.

  Brenner had not a drop of magic in his veins, and even though he was certainly not fighting the demon, he was also not putting his full skills at the creature’s disposal. Caliban could be reasonably sure of this because, for one thing, he did not currently have a throwing knife sticking out of his head.

  He doubted that would last long. As soon as he began to fight back, Brenner was going to realize that one of them could not leave this place alive.

  If I do not bind this demon, it will kill me. And then Slate will be left alone with a demon who wears her old lover’s face.

  Where is Slate?

  He risked a quick glance around and saw her down on the lower set of catwalks, looking up at them. She looked puzzled, possibly wondering why they were holding weapons pointed at each other.

  He waited until she was gone to reveal the demon. Brenner doesn’t want to kill her and the demon’s going along with it.

  Oh Dreaming God, what will he do to her?

  He felt something then, something like terror. He dared not think too much about it. He had seen too many victims when demons got their way.

  Brenner feinted with the knife, not a real strike, testing the response. Caliban didn’t bother with the sword, slapping the blade aside with his gauntleted hand.

  “What the devil are you two doing?”

  “Stay down there!” shouted Caliban and Brenner, more or less in unison.

  “What?”

  Brenner gave him a look, the affectionate, exasperated look they’d shared over Slate once or twice before. With the demon at the bottom of his eyes, it was a sickening mockery.

  “Like hell I’m staying down here! Are you two fighting?”

  “Time to finish this, shining one,” said the demon.

  Brenner moved forward like an eel. Caliban blocked and blocked again, losing ground with every strike.

  Too fast. He’s too damn fast.

  He swung his sword in a savage arc that should have taken the assassin’s head off. Brenner ducked.

  Despair was a familiar taste on Caliban’s tongue.

  But underneath it, something stirred. Something that he thought the demon had driven out forever, something he had long since given up.

  For the first time since that long ago exorcism, Caliban felt the presence of his god.

  They taught you very early in the temple that the Dreaming God did not make bargains. A demon had a bargain for everything. The Dreaming God did what He deemed necessary.

  You accepted His will. It was the only truly important tenet of Caliban’s faith.

  Caliban had been possessed. He had watched a demon kill the innocent with his body. The temple had turned him out for that crime, and the sin that had engendered it.

  It had been the god’s will. Caliban had raged against it, wept, even sank into the depths of despair…but in the end, he too had accepted.

  Now it seemed that the Dreaming God had returned.

  He was a wordless voice in His paladin’s mind, a burning star in the darkness.

  Caliban had wanted it for so long, and yet now, unaccountably, he fought it.

  You abandoned me! You let the demon take me and the temple break me! Why now?

  There was no answer to that. There never was. The morality of gods was not the morality of men. You dealt with it or you left the temple.

  Brenner sliced at him with a knife and Caliban leapt back.

  The wordless voice grew stronger. The god was heat and light and Caliban had grown used to floundering in the dark. His demon gibbered and shrank back, smaller and smaller, but the god was filling up the space where it had been, and yet Caliban was still angry, still fighting to keep it out.

  How dare You come back to me now?

  How dare…how dare…

  And then he heard his own thoughts, and almost he laughed at the absurdity of them.

  Pride. No matter how many times it trips you up, you are still so proud that you think a god should apologize to you.

  Do you apologize to your sword, when you set it aside, then take it up again?

  Brenner swung again. Caliban knew perfectly well that the assassin was trying to drive him backward towards the stairs, where one good strike to the legs would end the fight completely.

  You are fighting a demon in the body of an assassin, and your god comes to aid you, and all you can do is whine that He did not come soon enough.

  The god had come at last. And if Caliban was truly still a servant of his god, then he still had a chance to save Slate.

  All he had ever been was a sword in the hand of a god.

  He drew in a deep breath, drawn down to the bottom of his lungs, and then he did laugh, because for once, it really was that simple.

  He stopped fighting.

  Dreaming God…your servant waits.

  The demon blinked at him with Brenner’s eyes.

  What filled Caliban was not power. Power was perhaps the least useful of gifts.

  It was grace.

  It struck him like a hammer, like a death blow, like falling in love. It filled places that had rung hollow and empty and wrapped him up and made him whole.

  The demon took a step back, then two.

  The next breath Caliban drew tasted like incense and blood.

  Thank you.

  And across the catwalk, Slate saw, at last, what it was like when a true Knight-Champion fought a demon.

  Forty-Seven

  Why am I going blind? thought Slate, annoyed. It didn’t make sense. There was no bright light that she had been staring at, and yet for some reason Caliban was burned into her retinas as if she’d been staring into the sun, and Brenner was warped into a thing of horns and shadows.

  Did I take that chain upside the head and not notice?

  She’d had to crawl up the blasted wonder-engine to the wooden hopper they were using for the corpses. Every time a clocktaur had attacked the engine, she had to flatten out even farther, clinging to the smooth surface by teeth and toenails, waiting for the vibrations to stop.

  The fact that her leg had been savagely bruised and then scraped open in a couple places didn’t help at all.

  By the time she actually hauled herself over the dead bodies—which should have been disgusting, but by this point was just the sort of day she was having—she had heard steel ringing over the catwalks and had realized that something very bad was going on.

  She got to the platform by the door and stared at Caliban and Brenner.

  She had seen both men fight any number of times, and her professi
onal opinion was that, in an actual battle between them, Brenner would put two knives in Caliban’s eyes and one in his throat within ten seconds. It hadn’t happened yet, which had made Slate wonder if Brenner was toying with the paladin, and then something had happened and the air tasted briefly like metal and all of a sudden Brenner wasn’t toying with him any more.

  The assassin’s hand flickered and he threw a knife and Caliban slapped it out the air with his sword and that sort of thing just did not happen.

  He can’t have done that, she thought. He can’t have. He’s not fast enough. He fights by just standing there and taking punishment until his opponent drops dead of exhaustion from hammering on him.

  She was going up the ladder like a squirrel when another throwing knife clattered against the railing and fell onto the brawling clocktaurs below.

  What the hell is going on?

  She wasn’t surprised. She was furious and frightened for both of them—but not surprised.

  Goddamn men couldn’t wait until we were somewhere else to have it out, had to pick right now with a pack of berserk clocktaurs taking down the building…

  The clocktaurs in question slammed into a pillar and set the whole catwalk shaking. Stoats grabbed for the ladder, hearing bolts shriek as the metal bent.

  So not the time. I’m going to yell. Really yell.

  The clocktaurs working on the pillar began striking at each other instead. Slate went up the ladder and reached the upper catwalk.

  She poked her head up over the edge and said “What the f—”

  “Get back!” Caliban sacrificed a second to look at her and took a hit across the ribs. Even through the armor, that had to hurt.

  “He’s possessed!” shouted the paladin.

  “He what?”

  “Oh, this is better than I’d hoped, shining one…” purred Brenner, in a voice that wasn’t Brenner’s at all.

  Slate froze.

  Freezing is stupid. This is stupid. I am stupid.

  Brenner’s got a demon.

  Caliban kills demons.

  “Brenner?” she said. Her voice sounded small and uncertain in her own ears. “Are you…are you really…”