Engines of Desire: Tales of Love and Other Horrors

by Livia Llewellyn

  On certain nights in the city, when all the stacks of the factories are venting their smoking spleen, noxious fumes wash through Marketside District, rousing people from sleep long enough to reach for their ventilators. Gillian learned at an early age how to bind and fasten the straps around her head, adjust the long cylindrical nose against the lower half of her face, how to breathe and speak and sleep with charcoal-filtered air seeping in minuscule amounts through her gasping mouth. She learned to ignore the stench of her own breath, the vomitous tang of air that rose from her stomach in coughs and belches, only to slide into her nostrils and lungs. Later, she learned to fuck with the mask on—over time, it became less of a hindrance and more a clever means to disengage, an excuse to stare mindlessly at water-stained ceilings or unfamiliar skies while men grunted and pressed into the lower half of her body, seemingly a million miles away.

  Tonight, this last night in her cramped two-room flat, is not such a night. Gillian stands at the cracked panes of Sargasso-green glass, letting the cool metal tang of night air rush through her lungs. Outside and below, hooves clop and ring on the cobblestones, round a corner and fade; while distant trains rumble on tracks in and out of the city center, loaded with anything and everything that can be ripped from the lands and towering mountain range—Cordillera del Tenebroso—that makes up the narrow edge of the southern continent. Even a hundred miles away, nestled in the folds of the smaller mountains, she hears the sound—there are that many tracks, that many trains. Twenty-four hours of every day, there is always the stormless thundering of steam engines.

  “Someone will see you.” Emanuel lies on the bed, barely visible in the squares of warped light seeping through the glass. His arm is raised, holding out her worn robe.

  “I don’t care, it’s too hot. No one can see inside, anyway.” Nonetheless, she slips it over her naked skin. Emanuel is by nature a jealous man, but he is often prudent, cautious—something she is often not, despite her seemingly calm, detached demeanor. If there is a door open, or a window cracked, he wishes it shut, always. She wants it opened wider, to see what is beyond, where she might go—a nature forged by a childhood spent in the mines, where an open tunnel ahead meant “come inside.” And she always did. Time and time again, Gillian found fat drag some broken bit of statuary back into the city. It’s ridiculous.”

  “I’ve been to Feldspar before. It’s not quite ‘country.’ Far from it, in fact.”

  “What? You’ve been there, and you never told me?” Gillian doesn’t try to hide her annoyance. “Why? What did you do there?

  Emanuel sighs. Gillian’s body rises and falls with his breath as he speaks. “I didn’t say anything because it never came up. I mean, there was no reason to bring it up, I didn’t do anything exciting. I was part of the team that was sent to disinter the bodies and pack up the markers and statuary for travel. It was almost twenty years ago, it was mindless grunt work, that’s all. Like digging ditches. I did some quick restoration, some patching up of stonework, they paid me well, and that was that. I haven’t thought about it since then. It was largely forgettable.”

  “How long were you there?”

  “A couple of—months.”

  Gillian hears the slight catch in his reply, the way his voice swerves around an almost-spoken word and hitches itself to “months”. She is certain he was going to say years.

  “Were there any bodies or tombs you had to leave behind?”

  Emanuel shrugs. “I was positive we accounted for every grave and marker—we dismantled entire mausoleums, even. But it was a nightmare to find anything: overgrown weeds and bushes, thorns and brambles everywhere, some of the graves had shifted or sunk. Obviously we missed something. I’m surprised a single reliquary is the only thing we overlooked.”

  A thought surfaces in Gillian’s mind, like a river eel thrashing through the polluted muck of Becher Canal. “If everyone left the cemetery after it was relocated, who was there who would have found the reliquary? Why didn’t they take it to Hellynbreuke themselves?”

  Now Emanuel’s body stiffens ever so slightly. He’s going to lie to her, and he doesn’t even know it: but his flesh can’t lie, to itself or to her. Gillian feels his subconscious fight to control it, as the tremor moves from his arms and chest down to his legs. For a moment, it’s as if she’s holding a department store mannequin, and the thought repulses her. She resists the impulse to push him away, knowing the moment will pass.

  “We’ll have a traveling companion—she has rather formidable psychic abilities, but she needs an escort. Long journeys are hard on her. She’ll be staying behind to thoroughly excavate the site.”

  “A psychic,” Gillian says. “So, this isn’t just a pick-up. It’s also a delivery.”

  “More or less. The object is the important thing, of course.”

  “What’s her name?”

  “I don’t think she has one. Here, I have something for you.” Emanuel sits up, shifting Gillian aside as he reaches over to the wooden crate that serves as her nightstand. “Hold out your hand.” Gillian does so, and she feels his fingers press a square of marble onto her palm. She sighs, almost a groan, as if the weight of the stone is pushing her through all the floors of the tenement building into the pipe-riddled ground.

  “Please. I want something in my pocket, for luck.”

  “No.” Gillian tries to sit up, but Emanuel presses her back against the sheets.

  “Just one more time, love,” he says. “And I’ll never ask again. I promise.”

  “You promise?”

  Emanuel places his hand against his heart. “I swear to the Dreaming God.”

  Gillian holds the square up to the light. It’s a chip of Arihant Spider Green, dark as the wild forests and jungles far beyond the northernmost edges of Obsidia, supposedly. Gillian’s never seen any type of wilderness in person, never ventured beyond the crush of buildings into any part of the world where Obsidia is not—but she can imagine it. The whorls of her fingertips press down, catch against thin white veins caught within the green. She doesn’t know what part of the world the chip is from, or if there are forests and trees where it once lay, but no matter. Her fingertips warm the smooth surface, and images unfurl in her mind, a combination of her own imagination and the antediluvian strands of memory embedded in the stone: ragged outcrops of mossy boulders, erupting from forest lands like bones tearing apart aging skin, pocked and smoothed by autumn rains. Her fingertips move, caress, and the marble replies, moves; and grows still.

  “Done.” Gillian places the chip back into Emanuel’s hand. An exquisitely detailed leaf has appeared on the surface, crisscrossed in veins and ragged at the edges, as though it had been nipped by insects and animals. It looks chiseled—to the ordinary human eye, that is.

  “Are you sure it’s not alive?” As always, Emanuel has grown unsettled at watching her work. “How does the stone always know? How do you speak to each other?”

  “I’ve told you before, I don’t know. It’s a different kind of speaking, a different way of being alive,” Gillian says. “It’s not something I can explain or write down. I just know.”

  “It’s hard to believe you learned this in the mines. I can’t imagine what you created down there, inside rock so large and old.”

  Gillian thinks of Jasper, of all the flesh and blood she left behind. “You don’t create things in mines. You only destroy.”

  “Have you ever wanted to read me like that?”

  She stares at her lover, so opposite her in every way, so warm and alive and she so pale and Carrara-cold. “Humans are a different kind of life. I can’t read that kind of life the same way. I wouldn’t want to.”

  “You wouldn’t need to, love. There are better ways.” Emanuel slips his arms around her, drawing her close. She feels the chip press into her back, leaving indentations amidst her mine-scarred flesh. Gillian’s fingers surreptitiously touch the skin between her breasts before traveling down Emanuel’s body, as she wonders if this time the flame wil
l spark, and she’ll feel something, anything, for the man she should love. But her heart beats no faster than before, and that beat is slow as geology, as rare as Antarctic rain.

  “Will it at least be cooler in Feldspar, even if it’s not really the country?” She breathes the words into his neck as he parts her legs, presses into her again. “Will it be peaceful?”

  “As peaceful as the—”

  Gillian kisses him hard, so he cannot finish the sentence. All she hears now is the crack of canary wings, plunging from the obelisk into a room without a sun.

  Part Two

  I am the Stone the Builder Rejected

  Highgate Station clings to the lowest slopes of the mountain that forms the southern edge of Marketplace—which is to say, it towers above anything else in this part of Obsidia, save the forest of factory chimneys. In the pitch of night, the gothic-spired building glows like the translucent skull of a dragon, jagged maw opened wide to disgorge twenty-odd trains to all points across the city: suburban enclaves, bustling business districts, and industrial sections—even through the miles of elevated train yards that divide the entire metropolis neatly in half, keeping the slums underneath festering in a perpetual twilight of iron and steel.

  Gillian watches the trains from the large bay window of the quiet Club Room, an enclave reserved for the most powerful travelers of the city’s rail systems. She’s been allowed entrance this one time, so she doesn’t waste an opportunity she knows will never come again. A glass of fresh-pressed juice in one hand, she carefully bites into the center of a pain du chocolate and stares in stark awe at dawn creeping onto the edges of the city below. This is a view she has never seen before. Always she’s been in the middle of it, an insect blindly feeling its way through shifting rubble, too close to the mechanical monstrosities and marvels to truly comprehend their vast size. Now, she can barely comprehend the sprawling empire below. How is it that people can live inside all that steel and fire? How is it that any of them are alive?

  “Incredible, isn’t it.” Emanuel sits in a chair to the side, reading the morning paper as he finishes his second café. Archduke Assassinated in Sarajevo, one headline declares. “It’s almost six, dear. Earplugs.”

  “Yes, I have them.” She bites into the pain, but doesn’t chew.

  From her feet to the horizon, Obsidia stretches out and up: deep valleys of smoking furnaces and factories to snow-capped peaks of the Tenebroso crowned with stacks a hundred stories high, jetting green fire against the red disk of the rising sun. Countless train tracks catch the morning rays as they shoot from the bowels of the city, filled with the riches of the earth—copper, coal, silver, potassium nitrate and iron ore—and disperse up the hemisphere to all corners of the world. And in between the dark edges of industry, hazy spherical glimpses of another city rise from Obsidia’s midst, the strange geometries of their god’s city made real as it’s pulled from dark ocean waters thousands of miles away, and reassembled in their midst. In this moment, behind the thick glass: peace, or as much of it as the city can spare. She’ll remember it later in the day, when traffic roars through every slender lane and cyclopean boulevard, and she rushes past it all in a train bound to a dying town.

  In the back of the room, a clock begins chiming the night away. Gillian reaches for two small plugs of hard foam in her pocket, each carved in the cephalopodic shape of Obsidia’s ubiquitous god. The sixth bell sounds; and outside the station, horns howl the shift change, cleaving the moment between night and day with a single deep note that sets her bones trembling as hard as the window panes.

  “They’re going to come to us someday,” she says, the non-sequitur erupting on her tongue like bile—a common occurrence amongst Obsidians whenever the factory whistles blow, as though the sonic dissonance dislodges some unseen truth from their pineal eyes. “We’re going to arm the world with a guillotine for its own neck.” No one hears her speak. All across the horizon, as far as eyes can see, clouds of inky smoke shoot upward from ten thousand shaking brick and metal stacks, rigid fingers pinching out the sun. Morning shift has begun, and those who work the daylight hours above ground must rise and earn their keep. This city and its gods demand no less.

  Emanuel tosses the paper down and rises, motioning that it’s time. Gillian pulls the foam from her ears. “You know, I used to hear the shift change underground, all the time. This was the first time I’ve ever seen it like this.” She kisses him lightly on the cheek. “Thank you.”

  Emanuel holds up their tickets. “Thank your new employer. Come on. We have to meet the rest of the team. They’re already on the train.”

  “There are others coming? I thought it was just the psychic.”

  “Yes. And a few others, to help with setting up and running the camp; and transportation of the reliquary, if we need it.” Emanuel’s face turns neutral as he speaks, and Gillian grows dismayed. How much more does he know that he hasn’t said?

  As they leave the room, a grey-feathered chingolo begins serenading the rays of sunlight sliding through the windows. Several children gather around the cage, slipping bits of bread through the bars, despite knowing it’s no pet for their amusement, but there only to gauge the levels of toxic fumes in the room. Gillian doesn’t feel sorry for it. There isn’t a creature in Obsidia that doesn’t know why it was born, and how it must die.

  The lower levels of the station are all grey granite and sharp echoes, with occasional glimpses of smoking black steam engines resting on tracks, waiting to devour their passengers and race away. Names as terrible and magnificent as their quaking frames adorn onyx sides in letters of silver and gold: Lord of the Seventh Kingdom, Fantasma Imperador, Fist of the Southern Star. Gillian finds Track #16 at the far end of the wing, beyond a thick arch of rough-hewn stone. Under the low vaulting of the tunnel, Empress of Devastation awaits, her long black body throbbing with every pull and pound of the pistons and gears. Steam explodes from the stack and undercarriage, filling the space with python-sized coils of wet smoke. That Devastation’s six-foot-high wheels float several feet above the tracks makes Gillian understand that this is a lucid dream, that her body is already somewhere within the real Empress, fast asleep as her mind sinks in the oubliette of images flickering through her brain.

  “Ma’am, it’s time to board.”

  A platform conductor points to the closest car with a look on his malformed face that indicates stern disapproval of stragglers; and only seconds after Gillian hoists herself from the top of the rickety stepladder into the compartment, he slams the carriage door behind her: they are moving. The raised roof of the station slides away, revealing a sunless morning sky, and now they slide down gleaming tracks, toward the fiery heart of the city. Outside the car, clogged streets, crumbling factories and tangled knots of building-sized machines sail past in an uneven landscape, obscured only by trestles and the long blur of trains rushing in the opposite direction. Obsidia passes around and below her in all its filthy glory.

  You’re like the lemon tree. You haven’t been planted in ground where you can thrive.

  Gillian looks away from the window. Shattuck stands at the top of the aisle. At his back, the entire front of the train has disappeared, and the car is open to a bank of grey fog washing through the city, obscuring the ends of the rails and the factories until only twinkling light and flame remain. They rush headlong into the bank, the engines beneath her feet pounding like metronomes, a sound that recedes as the dream rolls forward with the train. They are traveling to a place without sound, without light or air: images of another dream lick at the corners of her mind. The weed-choked rails, the empty city, the gaping mouth of the tunnel, opening wide….

  A million miles away, her legs thrash helplessly.

  Don’t avoid remembering. Embrace it.

  No. Gillian is numb. Her eyes are open, and they cannot blink. Shattuck leans in, touches her cheek. The air has grown cold around her, and shards of ice fleck off her skin, reforming as quickly as they melt.

  Go ba
ck down.

  Never.

  Shattuck raises his hands in a gesture of helplessness. Then, we must take you there.

  Obsidia has disappeared in the thick mist. She sees only the rails, the mouth gobbling up the ends.

  Show me how you speak to the God.

  There is no God. Outside the dream, in the world, she’s pissing herself.

  Shattuck grins, his teeth filed to points. That’s not what you told your mother.

  Silence fills the car.

  Tell me how you speak to the stone. How does it answer?

  Gillian raises her hands. Shattuck sucks in his breath, but before he can move or speak, she’s on him, one hand against his face, the other gripping his throat. Shattuck howls as her glacier-cold skin burns against the lids of his eyes. He stumbles back, sliding along the side of the carriage seats as she shoves him over to the stone walls of the car, pinning him like a bug. Before he thinks to push back, Gillian moves her hand from his face to his chest, pressing her palm flat against his rib cage. Her eyes close.

  It answers like this.

  Rows of headstones rising from a cold paved land, mountain landscapes covered in uncarved slabs of ancient schist, cold rain jetting from slate skies, washing away any hint or speck of life. Beneath her hands, Shattuck writhes, his body shuddering and twitching as his skin breaks apart like a rotting corpse. Water-smooth megaliths, glacial effluvia spreading across dying tundra—muscles split, spilling organs and bones not down but across the stone in stinking rivers of crimson and muddy brown. Cartilage snaps, bones clatter and split into shards, swirl across the smooth slabs in tightening spirals until they work their way inside, subsumed by the metamorphic and igneous slabs. His skull and ribs are the last to disappear, grinning teeth clattering as they grind down into chalky threads that sink slowly into the rocks, and vanish. Shattuck is gone. All that remains is the dead country, a vast expanse of rock and granite sky as far as her eye can see; and her hands flat against the wall, staring at an unmarked grave for a man rendered out of life and into Archean lands.