by Tim Akers
"No one else," Wilson said. "Come on."
Of course Wilson didn't recognize him. He'd only seen Gray the one time, on the docks. And the way Gray Anderson looked right now, his own mother would have turned aside.
His eyes were twisted in fear and shock, but the rest of his body looked perfectly relaxed, in spite of the blood. Someone had shoved a ball of twine into his mouth. He was dressed in the Wright's vestments, simple brown and black. I always knew Gray claimed to be a Wright who got away from the Algorithm, but I had never imagined him dressed like this. I wondered how he would have felt, to be found like this. Also wondered why someone had taken the time to dress him up, just to kill him.
There was a single wound, an improbably large puncture wound to the center of his chest. The weapon that made it was still there. From here it looked like a copper tube, plugged with glass. Around the injury was a sticky ring of blood, dry and black. Nasty.
Wilson was ignoring the body. Naturally, because the rest of the room looked like a mad scientist's drunken fantasy, in the process of being dissected. Brass pipes lined the walls, stacked to various depths and of progressive height. Bits of the ceiling had been knocked out, to accommodate the larger items. Each pipe was enclosed in a tangle of tubing that led to the next pipe, or fed from the previous one. Each pipe was open at the top, and cut at an angle, away from the center of the room. Something was passing between the pipes, a sound, like a hurricane heard from far away.
"I don't think this is what he was expecting, when we took this job," I said. Wilson was circling the room, touching the pipes lightly with the talon tips of his spider arms. "Guess I couldn't get him out of this trouble."
He stopped and looked down at the body, recognized him finally. "He was coming back here, wasn't he? After we left on the boat this morning?"
"Yeah. Damn it, Gray. Why couldn't you just be happy living in shitty little houses, doing shitty little jobs?"
Wilson came and stood next to me. He laid an arm across my shoulders.
"Because he isn't you, Jacob. Most folks want to better themselves."
I shrugged his arm off. "Maybe don't give me shit right now, Jacob. This guy was my friend."
"You're a terrible person to friend, Jacob." He turned back to pipes. "Friends of yours keep ending up dead."
"Show a little respect for the dead guy in the room, man."
"Dead guy'll still be dead tomorrow. There's something with these pipes."
"Is there something about them that could have shoved a copper tube through Gray's chest?" I asked. "Because if not, I'm not sure they're immediately relevant."
"Could be," he answered, shrugging. "See if you can find some kind of valve. Or a control panel. Or maybe -"
He stopped moving, but his voice continued around the room, ghosting from pipe to pipe, quieter and quieter. Wilson turned to look at me. Rather needlessly, he held a finger to his lips. Quiet. Got it.
The anansi's voice tumbled away into silence, but the background hurricane kept rolling. I bent my head to it, trying to pick up snatches of sound. My eye was drawn uncomfortably to Gray's restful corpse at the center of the room. Maybe his voice, the last seconds of his terrified life, caught up in this garden of pipes and held forever in brass? I shivered and put a hand on Wilson's shoulder. Pulling him close, I whispered directly into his ear.
"Why do you think Crane would leave this contraption behind?" I asked. Wilson's voice, when he replied, smelled like insect wings and dust.
"Because it's heavy, idiot." His lips hardly moved when he spoke, though his teeth were bared. I was reminded of just how many teeth he had. Wasn't usually this close to them. Their bright white enamel was veined in black that seemed to pulse with each word. "You don't just lug equipment like this around every time you get spooked."
"Which means he might come back for it? Or that he planned to be here for a while?"
Wilson shrugged. The noise in the room was picking up. He squinted at me nervously.
"Or that he doesn't mind it being found. Like the mask. He wants someone to find this." He looked around at the pipes and their tangled feet. "I can't for the life of me tell what it's meant to do, though."
"Can we get back to the dead guy at..." I stopped, because something tapped against my foot. I looked down to see a ball of twine, sticky with spittle and blood. I looked over at the body. It was looking at me, running a dry tongue over its lips. Gray's lifeless, bloodless lips.
"You have forgotten so much about us, Veridon," it said. "What we are. What we do." The body struggled to one elbow, it head lolling across its chest. "How we do it. I am disappointed."
The pipes behind me jangled as I backed into them, my hand clenched around Wilson's shoulder. He shrugged me off and shuffled around the perimeter of the room. The body followed him with one lazy eye, then turned back to me.
"Although I hadn't expected to see you again, Jacob Burn. I really thought the river would take you. Appropriate, I suppose. Unexpected." It coughed, and dryness filled the air, like a tomb unfolding. "Your friend can stop that."
I looked up at Wilson. He was fiddling with the pipes, though he didn't seem to have much direction. Just pulling on tubes, rattling brass. He shot me an angry look and kept at it.
When I looked back at the body, something had changed. The face was bulking up, the skin blossoming in a frost that spread until the skin was pale and bright. The skull lengthened and became narrow. I was reminded of The Summer Girl, the child becoming the woman becoming the singer. The body locked eyes with me and smiled.
"He doesn't have to. It was just advice." The voice expanded, filled the room, the words resonating through the air and into my bones like lightning, close and dangerous. "Something to keep him from hurting himself."
Wilson stumbled back, falling over, his head coming to rest against the body. That heavy voice rolled with laughter, and the legs began to twitch. Wilson jumped up and circled back to me. He gave a meaningful look at my hand. Of course. The revolver. What was I thinking?
I raised my iron and sighted. The body watched me do this, calmly, appraising each action. As I cocked, it nodded once, the smile unwavering. The report shook the room, flash and bang washing out the spiritual whirlwind of the pipes. When I lowered my hand, part of the body's face was missing. I watched as it grew back, like water closing over a blade. The edges of the wound skittered as they sealed shut.
"Just so, Jacob. Just so." He pushed himself into a sitting position, all his weight on one thin arm. He looked at us like a drunk, fallen in the street and propped up, his legs numb on the ground. "So much has been forgotten. Cut out from the history books. Much like the Burns, yes? Much like the many fallen families."
"I know you," I said, recognizing the long face, the narrow mouth. "Ezekiel Crane. I know who you are."
"You do and you don't," the body answered. The voice seemed to vibrate out of the pipes around us, music from an organ, and descend upon the body. I felt like I was hearing the voice in my bones a half breath before the dead man's mouth formed the words. "Your father may know me, but again. Not really."
I fired again, because I'm an optimist. Bullets sometimes work the second time. This one passed through his arm and dented a pipe beyond. The voice warbled for a second, then came back, louder than ever.
"I meant for the river to have you, Jacob. But it might be better this way. More honest." Struggling to his feet, the body hunched forward as he addressed me. "This way, maybe you can be more than just a joke I tell myself." Straightened up and looked me in the eye. "Maybe this time around, you'll be the one wearing the mask."
Wilson jumped forward and put his knife once, twice, three times, fast, into the chest. The body laughed, staggered, and then swatted the thin anansi aside. His knife clattered between the pipes, out of reach.
"I'm not going to kill you. Tried that, and it didn't work. So maybe you're some kind of cosmic gift, Jacob. Jacob and his annoying bug friend. Maybe, in time, you'll understand what I'm d
oing. Why I'm doing it. You're not the one I expected to come here, although I'm sure they're on their way." The body rested his hands on his hips and looked toward the door. "We can wait, if you want. Not what I would do if I were you. But it's your call."
"We'll wait," I said. "Whoever it is, at least they don't hide in dead bodies and try to kill me."
The body smiled and cocked his head at me.
"Don't they? Isn't that exactly what they do, Jacob? Isn't that exactly what they've done?"
I fired again, this shot hitting his throat. The eyes bulged for a second as the soft column of flesh reformed. I swear I saw the briefest vision of wings, fluttering across the gaping wound.
"You've got to stop doing that, Jacob. I'm patient, but it won't last forever. Maybe I reset this encounter. Kill you and your friend, and let the proper people find the mask. I try to not question the universe, but you're proving to be a little difficult."
"Summer Girl," I said, realization washing over me as I lowered my revolver until it was pointing at the glass plug in his chest. "But I've heard that song."
Three fast shots, then the hammer fell on an empty chamber. The lead buried itself into the glass. It was the second shot before Crane realized what I was doing, dead hands jerking over his chest. Too late. Just a bit too late. The pipe burst, and his life came fluttering out on dry paper wings.
The room filled with a cloud of insects, pouring from the body's newly reopened wound. Smooth, black and shiny, like jeweled honey, buzzing angrily out of his chest. The body flailed and jerked, but the face was supremely calm. Almost pleased. He gave me one last look, utter satisfaction, and then the illusion fell away in sticky slabs of false meat. The facade collapsed, pulled away from the animated flesh, and the body tumbled once more to the floor. The cloud of insects swarmed across the pipes, sucking the last whispering madness from their echoes, then fell to the ground. Dead.
"Maker beetles," Wilson said, running his toe through the dry husks. "Huh."
"So he's some kind of cogwork carrier?" I asked, kneeling down by the body. A few stragglers crawled up out of his mouth. The wounds Wilson and I gave him were back, ragged flesh torn open by bullet and blade. "Some kind of artificer trick?"
"Not like any trick I've ever seen," Wilson answered. He pried open the mouth with curious fingers, then felt around the bloody plug in his chest. The brass tube came free with a sucking pop. Nothing special about it, just a glass vial sheathed in metal. Only thing of note was that it had been driven violently into my friend's chest. "Nothing but what you'd usually find inside a dead man. No cogwork, no foetal metal. Nothing to run... whatever that was."
He tossed the vial to the ground and watched it roll away.
"What are we doing, Wilson?" I asked. "What the hell is happening here?"
"From the sound of it, someone is coming to find this mask." He fished his knife out from the machinery, gave the body one last look, and then headed to the door. "And I'd like to be well gone before they get here."
It was Gray's face looking back at me, once again. I cycled the chamber of my revolver, dumped the shells onto the floor, and then reloaded. I wasn't a good friend. Wasn't a good person to be friends with. You end up dead, then you end up coming back from the dead, and I have to shoot you in the chest. Not a good friend.
Wilson was already downstairs before I left the room. I think I was the only one who heard the pipes laughing as I clattered down the stairs. But I probably didn't hear that. Probably just in my head.
A MAKER BEETLE is kind of a leftover miracle. A scrap from something that came before us, that we don't fully understand. The only people who had any knowledge of such things belonged to the Artificers Guild, and they only knew the bare minimum. There was a time when the Guild was a broader interest, with offices at the Academy of Thought and Practice, and apprentices and masters and a bustling trade of scientific inquiry. Now all that was left of that was the Council-sanctioned Guild. They were mostly for entertainments, like The Summer Girl or the other engram singers, who performed a very specific series of songs or plays, the memories clipped from the original players and recreated for generations.
Those memories were somehow stored in the beetles. Wilson tried to explain it to me, once. How Wilson knew is its own mystery, and maybe he didn't really know, because I couldn't really understand it. But basically, a memory could be engraved in the queen beetle, the pattern of the singer and the song, what it felt like to be that person and do that thing. And then the queen could be implanted in an engram singer, and her hive of maker beetles would... well... remake the singer into that memory. There was a lot of cogwork involved, since the singer need to be able to accommodate a whole hive of scuttling beetles. The details of how those machines worked was a closely guarded secret within the Guild. Understandable. The Academy didn't advertise how they made the PilotEngine, either.
The end result was a memory that could be played out in flesh. With the help of the beetles, an engram singer could become a specific singer, and perform a song exactly as it was sung decades ago. Even hundreds of years, as long as the queens were well bred. That's what the Guild did these days. Breed queen beetles, maintain hives, and teach little girls to sing like memories.
WE WATCHED THEM arrive at Crane's house from a couple blocks away, sitting in the second floor of an atrium bar. An automaton pillar in the center of the atrium was playing out all the bawdy scenes from "The Fifty Nights of Winter" in clacking, whirring earnest. Even the painted wooden whores looked embarrassed. Wilson and I drank coffee and looked out the window.
They arrived in a sealed carriage. The engine was nice and new, brass plates shuffling behind the baffles in quick time. Not the kind of carriage you usually saw in this district. Which was sloppy. It was memorable. Unless they didn't care if people knew they were dealing with Crane.
Three figures went inside, dressed in heavy black coats and hoods. No-one I recognized, although at this distance I wouldn't have recognized myself in a coat and hood. Not a minute later one of them came out and signaled down the road. More carriages, bearing the sigil of the Badge.
"Council people, then?" I asked. There weren't a lot of other patrons at this hour, but I kept my voice low.
"Could be. Badge has become awfully mercenary in the last couple years." Wilson drank from his cup and grimaced. "Could just be someone with the right amount of coin."
I murmured something about getting a price list and finished my coffee. The waitress came by to fill the cup, all smiles and bust. When she was gone I turned back to the window.
"So where next? To the Artificers? I don't know anyone in that set."
Wilson held his cup about halfway to his mouth, staring idly out the window. Not sure he was seeing anything.
"I'd rather not. We have other leads to follow. The mask, for example."
"What was that about, do you think? What Crane said?"
Wilson shrugged. "Maybe you'll be wearing the mask this time? Who knows. I think our friend Crane may be a little insane."
"Yes. A little," I smiled. "It was the bit where he animated my dead friend so he could have a conversation with us that sold me on it. Before then, you know, with the thing where he changed all the Fehn into mad corpses, that wasn't quite insane enough."
"You have very high standards, Mr. Burn," Wilson said.
"I have to. Look at the people I hang out with."
Wilson snorted and put his coffee down. "I take it you've recovered fully from looking into the mask, then?"
"Not at all," I answered, shivering. "Not even a little."
"What did you see?" he asked.
I told him, as best I could. It was the feeling of being rooted out and cast aside that was the hardest to communicate. I felt like a tree, torn out at the root and thrown on a fire of absolute heat. The brightest fire ever imagined. Just talking about it made me sweat.
"Well. That's not completely different from what I saw. Just more," Wilson paused, considering his next words,
trying not to look me in the face. Finally he raised his eyes. "More personal. Like it was written for you, and not me."
"Written for me? That's good to know. Should we go around the city showing it to people, to see how they react? Maybe we could figure out what it means by triangulating how terrified different people are of it. We could start with my dad, couldn't we? He's been a bit mad in the head ever since..." I stumbled. Ever since I had lost Emily, ever since he had finally, utterly thrown me out of the family. Ever since he swore he would never see me again, and shut himself up in the house, and refused to acknowledge he even had a son. Ever since then. "Yeah. Maybe that extra bit of madness would do him some good. Do you think?"
Wilson wasn't listening to me. He was absolutely still, the coffee cup gripped firmly in his fingers, staring out the window.
"Wilson? Are you even hearing me?"
"Jacob. The young lady out there, the one talking to the Badge. Does she look familiar?"
I looked. All smiles and bust.
"No wonder no one's refilled my cup," I spat. As we watched, the girl turned and pointed back to the bar. The Badge turned with her, then set off towards us at a trot.
"Time we were going," Wilson said. We stood and took two steps toward the iron corkscrew stairs that led to the main floor, and the exit. There was someone standing at the top of the stairs, looking at us. Waiting for us.
She was young, or at least had the body of a young woman. Dressed scandalously in pants and a vest, all cinched closely to her form. It reminded me of how factory workers secure every flap of clothing, to keep it from the hungry machines. An odd contrast. The vest was covered in button-flap pockets, and her belt was wide and black. Many weapons hung at her hips. She wore bulky gloves that contrasted sharply with the grace and cut of her form.