by S. M. Peters
If the poison got into his body, it would leech into those three minds. What did it matter what became of his own?
He nodded as if listening. Let Hews think what he would, and let Thomas, who was waiting for them on the street above, do the same. Hews might still go ahead if he knew the outcome, but he’d lose Tom.
“The tines must puncture the skin,” Von Herder was saying. “Once a circuit is made, the device will activate automatically.”
Oliver slipped the device into a pocket, tines pointing outward.
“We’re in your debt, sir,” Oliver said, trying to sound confident and grateful.
The old mechanic smiled. “Considerably.” He reached to a second cord and pulled it. The bulb in the front half of the workshop died as well, leaving them all in pitch darkness.
Bergen grumbled from the stair: “I suppose you find that terribly funny, Herr von Herder.”
“Terribly, Herr Keuper. I’ll see myself out. The hour is late and I’ve a want to soothe my throat with your grotesque English brew.”
Somewhere off to his left, Hews stiffly thanked the man. Oliver pictured him bowing and tipping his hat.
Slow steps, then a sliver of amber light as the door at the stair’s top opened, spilling over Bergen’s tight jaw.
“I hope you two have a plan for accessing the Chimney,” Bergen said. “It is not a place most men return from.”
“You’ve been to a few such places, if your tales have been any indication,” Hews said.
“And in any case, you’re not coming with us,” said Oliver.
The German’s glare was that of a statue in some ancient, vine-tangled ruin.
“I do not think I heard you properly, Sumner.”
“Don’t fight me on this one, Bergen,” Oliver said. “What use is that cannon of yours when one shot will bring the entire Stack down on our heads?”
“There are many noises in the Stack to cover such things.”
“I need you in Shadwell.”
There in the bottom levels of the hide, the noises of the city seemed distant, as did the safety they provided.
“You are trying to rid yourself of me again, Sumner. Why, after all I’ve done for you, do you still expect treachery from me?”
“Why do you expect me to expect it? Shadwell won’t hold out, even with the lift gone. The crows may build another lift. The golds may just climb down. Heckler’s a good lad, and Hanley as well, and all of them, but they aren’t soldiers.”
The expression on the German’s face was clear: he was deciding whether Oliver’s leadership was worth the trouble.
“Bergen, there are hundreds of people in the Underbelly. The canaries have just been waiting for an excuse to revenge the Uprising, and they won’t spare a quarter. I need your gun there, Bergen. I need you to lead them.”
Some distant vibration hummed the air in the long silence before Bergen spoke. “You care for these people.”
“Yes, I do. And I trust you to honour that.”
Bergen’s words became very quiet then, whispered without a hint of an accent. “Maybe he was wrong.” The German turned and silently ascended. His shadow fell across the stairs and then they were in light again.
The room felt suddenly empty, as with the release of some pressure.
Hews’ hand fell on Oliver’s shoulder, gave a squeeze, and then he, too, mounted the stairs.
Oliver stood alone in the dark a moment, then followed.
Half an hour later they walked into the most dangerous place on Earth.
Oliver’s first step onto the platform at the Stack’s station sent shudders through his bones. The metal vibrated with a subsonic tone, feeling slippery and loose, as if it moved beneath the feet. The beams of soot-coated iron rose up in their thousands and bent inward towards their Lady. Steam shot into the skies like escaping dragons, and on the higher slopes where no human being could go, gears the size of cities churned relentlessly. Oliver could not help but despair at the inhuman mass of the structure. It was one thing to witness it from afar; quite another to have it surrounding him, touching him at every point like a thousand-fingered claw twitching slowly closed.
The Stack had grown up like the towers, irregardless of tiny human concerns. In places, the walkways had to skirt monstrous boilers and furnaces, sometimes vast stretches of slope where mechanical arms bent and shaped metals to their Mother’s purposes. It was a living expression of the iron goddess, surging mindlessly into the sky, and crushing those weak creatures fool enough to interfere.
The fire blazed in the back of Oliver’s mind, hotter than lightning, and his eyes burned like magnesium. He wore his hat low over his face. He’d wrapped a veil of cloth around his eyes to dull the light, but it was thin enough that he could still see.
Hews went first, as he knew the Stack and had been there many times.
“Like stepping from church directly onto the lake of fire,” he’d said of it. Hews wore a thick, wet handkerchief tied over his mouth and nose against the air. Oliver had found that, like Tom, his lungs were not bothered by it.
Gold cloaks watched them dismount with the rest of the small crowd. Their eyes tracked in jumps, in perfect rhythm with the station’s giant clock. These ones showed clearer signs of Grandfather Clock’s influence: their bone structure was more rounded, their faces more angular, with stretches and sometimes splits in their skin to accommodate growths beneath. The platform emptied into a thin corridor between shapeless steel monoliths where Boiler Men stood like statues, row on row, guns to their shoulders, glass eyes staring into some unseen void. Oliver felt a chill as he passed in front of each, a hint of some emptiness that seeped into his mind from their gazes.
Two more cloaks scrutinised them with luminescent electric eyes as they reached the grand arch that exited the station. They betrayed no hint of recognition.
You don’t even recognise yourself, chum.
They cringed and drew back as the light of Oliver’s eyes fell on them.
The arch emerged onto one of a hundred concourses that ringed the Stack at different altitudes. Sparks lanced along naked copper wires hung between the beams above. Heat pummelled them from all quarters, carried through the building’s supports, walls, and floors. The sounds of the machines were like the cries of giants locked beneath the Earth.
They walked the empty streets in silence, not daring to think, and frightened sometimes to breathe. Those men they did pass, labourers kept at the machines long hours, moved like hollow ghosts, only the red light of the Stack’s angry fire to define them.
The rumble of the titans’ struggles beat on Oliver’s inner ears, and their blows shook his knees. Oliver found himself leaning on Tom more and more for support as they worked their way in. He did not miss the glances Tom and Hews exchanged.
They walked one of the many broad avenues that connected the rings with the Stack’s central tower. On either side, endless rows of closed doors led to the factories. Now and all night, those unfortunates confined within would run the machines to Mama Engine’s unknowable purpose, under the direction of their semihuman masters.
From the avenue, Hews led them along catwalks toward the Stack’s inner walls, over huge smelting pits and lonely arenas populated with twitching mechanical creatures. They passed lightless wells hundreds of feet deep, cranes and engines and monstrous glass spheres with dark fire burning deep inside. There was not a single clock to be seen, and their march became timeless, eternal.
Oliver felt nausea welling up, and shut his eyes awhile as he walked. The gods savaged each other somewhere above. Grandfather Clock’s tick was omnipresent. And there—something else. Laughter?
“This is the place,” Hews said. The words stilled the atmosphere like curses spoken in church. “It has a steam lock, and my contact was unable to obtain a key.”
Oliver stepped forward. The door was pitted like pig iron, and sealed across by four bolts. The lock was a small hole in the casing, no wider than two fingers.
O
liver knelt before it and produced from his pocket a copper tube that split into six pipes at the far end, each pipe capped with a rubber cup. Oliver felt around the inside of the lock, noting the shape of the interior. He bent the six pipes to match.
In a moment he rose and gestured to Tommy. The big man knelt down, drew in an enormous lungful of air, and blew into the pipe with all his strength. Some colour came back into his cheeks and a click sounded. There followed the hiss of escaping steam and the bolts withdrew. Tom drew the heavy door back to reveal an abyss on the other side.
“You’re certain your chap wouldn’t lead us wrong?” he asked.
Hews stepped past and into the door. “They’re all like this.” The darkness swallowed him whole.
Tom shifted uncomfortably behind.
“Abandon all hope, ye who enter here?” he said. His chuckle died in infancy and he cleared his throat. “After you, Chief.”
Oliver stepped through. The light of the street vanished and new light replaced it. Oliver walked on a net of woven chains above a bed of white coals. Glass creatures of indefinite form wriggled between the links.
“What can you see, Hews?” Oliver asked.
“As much as a bat in the daylight.”
“I thought as much.”
Heat withered him, blasting up from below, pressing in from the sides. He focused on his shoes, fearing to look up and have the vision of Mama Engine’s true self drive him mad.
He heard Hews fumbling with an electric torch. With a hiss, it brought light into the hall—beautiful, mundane light. The vision faded into a barely illuminated pipe hallway, ending in a malformed ladder leading down.
Tom stepped in and closed the door. “Cloaks outside,” he said. “A pack of golds, and they might have seen me.”
“The baron knows we’re coming,” Oliver said. He had no torch, electrics being difficult to find in Whitechapel, but the radiance of his eyes seemed to work just as well.
“Lad, when were you going to tell us that?”
Oliver looked over at Hews. The older man’s face was cut with two sets of shadows.
“Truth be told, I wasn’t, but this is all pressing my mind and I let it slip.”
“You weren’t going to tell us at all?”
“It didn’t seem relevant,” Oliver said with a shrug.
“Not relevant?” Hews said. “We’ll be caught for certain, lad. He’ll have guards at every entrance.”
“We will walk in a straight path all the way into the Chimney,” Oliver said. “The baron won’t stop us. The crows won’t stop us. All we need to worry about are the canaries.”
Creases formed around Hews’ eyes. “Explain yourself, lad.”
“We have divine favour on our side, Hewey.”
“Tell me you did not deal with these creatures.”
“Perhaps I did. Or perhaps this is all just fortunate happenstance. If you’re looking for an explanation, I will have to disappoint you.”
Oliver grimaced as a wave of nausea hit him. He must have swayed, for an instant later Tom’s big hands were on his shoulders, steadying him.
“We trust you, Chief,” he said. “Always have, always will.”
He must have been sharing a look with Hews, for the older man ground his jaw a moment, then turned away.
Oliver removed his blindfold. “Let’s get on.”
The ladder led them to more tunnels, which they navigated by way of a map hastily scribbled during the evacuation of Sherwood. More than once, Oliver looked at the map with the flickering light of his eyes, and knew, beyond doubt, that it was incorrect. Then he led them rightly in spite of Hews suspicions and Tom’s worry. It was the same as it had been with the Summa Machina: the knowing sprung from Mama Engine’s fire in the back edge of his mind.
Why didn’t he tell them? Wouldn’t they be able to understand and accept what had happened?
They jumped when the black cloak came crawling from the dark and he had his answer.
This is bigger than them.
Only the last vestiges of a human face remained: skin hung in tatters from metal cheekbones. Scraps of black cloth hung from the rest of the body. It came at them crawling on the ceiling, bracing itself with a dozen limbs, clicking and scraping and pushing a wall of heat before it.
Thomas immediately jumped in the way. Hews drew his pistol and took a firing position at the tunnel’s edge.
Oliver pushed Tom aside with a gentle hand.
The cloak angled its neck to stare at him with glass eyes. Oliver stared back with his. Some ripple of kinship, barely felt, passed between them, stirring the fires in Oliver’s head. It swivelled its head back to the fore and crept off down a side tunnel.
“We are all the children of God.”
Mrs. Lewis had said it once, in the distant past when she was still alive and trying to mould him into a good Christian boy.
Oliver started off down the next tunnel without waiting for the others.
The sounds of machinery rang all around, and the corridors stank of rot and rust and mildew. Each step became an eternity; each movement an exercise in navigating not only the Mother’s physical innards, but the flashes of terror and desire that for moments blanked out his own thoughts with those of the goddess.
And then he heard laughter in the halls—horrid, human, distorted by echo.
“What do you hear?” he asked.
“Damnable machines,” Hews said. “Why do you ask, lad?”
“Tom?”
“Same ol’, Chief, and the, uh…I got a buzzing in my guts, Ollie.”
Oliver nodded.
They kept walking, coming up on what the map described as a machining room. Oliver’s intuition pinged, so he stopped them again.
“Chief?”
Oliver motioned for silence. The laughter was still there, louder now, closer.
It could be nothing.
“Put out the light, Hewey.”
Hews reached down and struggled until the electric went dark.
“Sit tight a bit.”
Oliver opened his eyes wide, spraying white light onto the corridor. Then he squinted, focussing through the metal. The tunnel fell away. The heat became red fire, the structure became chains and glass. Beneath the chains, a stream of embers floated through the air.
It might destroy him to look, but he couldn’t ignore his intuition again.
“Fellows,” he said, hoping his voice would echo in the solid world. “Keep a watch.”
He lifted his head. His eyes passed over the field of chains and glass creatures and ashen corpses. The vista stretched endlessly, folding back on itself in his perception and blotting out the city that lay beyond. The corpses twitched and spasmed, grinning with blackened teeth. He lifted his eyes farther, to where more corpses hung on lines of flaming coals. Hundreds of them swung there, illuminated from above by orange light, all limbs rocked with the arc of their motion, shedding ash into the world below.
The laughter persisted, still higher.
More corpses greeted him as he leaned back, condensing in their thousands and tens of thousands towards a single point. They overlapped and mingled, sharing the same spaces with their fellows, tricking the eye into seeing them all at once. As he drew his eyes up, the corpses became less and less human. He saw creatures as tiny as spiders and as large as towers, of blasphemous and alien proportions. He looked through these, around them, his vision passing unimpeded through them though they blocked its line.
Powerful desires and impulses washed through his mind—nameless drives and consuming hungers. At each of these he felt his body jerk as it reacted. He found his own voice screaming them.
I want to be alone! I want to be loved! I love my children! I must be controlled!
His eyes came to a point on which they could not focus, where his perception slid about as if distorted through a thousand shaped lenses. Around this one point the fire raged and whirled, streaks of orange and red biting at the corpses, then dragging them into it. Urges
tore through him, burning into his brain, shredding any of his own thoughts that dared take root in action. He couldn’t move, couldn’t think, could not be.
The laughter called him on. As it echoed once again through Mama Engine’s thoughts and bones, that single point of madness shuddered and shrank, and its orbiting fires stilled. Oliver escaped its pull, and looked up one final time.
Suddenly the heat vanished, to be replaced by a bitter cold. Snakes of impassive logic reached down from above, ringed and coated in scuttling creatures whose images formed in his mind as nonvisual flashes of knowing. His reality fell to pieces in so many disconnected memories: a boy shamed, a chemical burning, an escape—murders, tears, midnight masturbations, and things done to little boys. How he loved the boys, how he wanted his own…and then came the disgusting touch of woman.
He saw a skull laughing, empty within and bare without, shadowed faces in each socket.
Yes, my love! I will lash you in chains of your own pleasure. Moan for me, my love. Moan and ripen!
A figure ran towards the skull’s teeth, his feet scuffing on the air. It wore a coat of many pockets.
“Aaron!” Oliver cried.
Aaron ran straight into the skull’s maw.
Glass creatures leapt upon Oliver’s arms and sank their teeth into him.
“Light!” Oliver screamed. The creatures rolled over his body, searing through his clothing and gnawing through his skin. “Hewey, for God’s sake, the light!”
A click. Dark fell like a theatre curtain. The glare of a single bulb brought him back. Tom was holding him, shaking him, calling his name.
Oliver cried out as the fresh burns on his arms and chest scraped against the cotton of his shirt. His clothes were still whole; his body was not.
“Don’t touch. Don’t…”
Obediently, Tommy dropped him against the tunnel wall, where he writhed against the burning.
“What happened?” Hews boomed. “What did you just do, lad?”
Aaron will take care of it. Just keep to the mission.