Dead of Veridon

by Tim Akers

  The factory roared into wild mechanical life. The sheets blew off the machines or were consumed and shredded, spewed up into the air like linen snow. The sound was tremendous, the tearing of cloth, the grinding howl of engines that hadn't been maintained, suddenly awake and shuddering with disuse. With a clattering moan, the track that crisscrossed the factory floor lurched into motion.

  The engine that I was standing next to unfolded like a spider on its back. I rolled to the ground, scooped up my pistol and scrambled, face to the floor, away from its spinning arms. When I got to my feet, the girl was gone. The Badge, though, was everywhere.

  They took the restart of the factory as some kind of initiation of hostilities, and were taking no chances. The tiny open space where I stood was pinned in on three sides by whirling machinery, going through the motions of assembling and production. The fourth side was bordered by the rattling assembly track. Beyond, I could see a unit of Badgemen advancing, shortrifles leveled, ballistic shields strapped to their arms. They hadn't seen me yet. In fact, they seemed to be advancing on a pile of crates that had somehow survived the animation of the engines around them.

  I hunched below the lip of the assembly track, creeping as close as I dared without risking getting caught in its gears. The air was filled with shreds of linen, floating down like confetti. Some of them were alight, and there was a great deal of smoke billowing up from the floor. Either a friction fire, or exhaust from the primitive engines, I wasn't sure. A large section of sheet slumped to the ground near the patrolmen, temporarily blocking their view of the crates. The girl hopped out from where she had apparently been hiding, landed near the still collapsing sheet, and then charged through its fluttering edges and into the Badgemen. Chaos and gunfire ensued, and then she was past them, bounding between machinery to disappear among the burning linen and screaming engines. The patrol was a shambles, several of them down, more still trying to react to the sudden assault. They huddled like a tortoise, shields out, shortrifles flicking back and forth. Yelling. Lots of yelling.

  "There's one here," from behind me, and I turned. Three officers on the other side of the whirling spider-machine. "Come on out, lad," they said from behind the barrels of their weapons. I jumped up on the track, thinking to make it to the other side and try my luck with the frightened tortoise. But the track was not smooth, and not to be jumped on lightly by someone like me. The iron girl probably could have managed it. The surface was articulated, a series of thin levers that depressed and gripped whenever pressure was applied. I applied pressure with my foot, and the thing ate my leg up to the shin. I stumbled, went down, submitted hands and elbows and face into the hungry track. Metal pinched flesh and drew blood. Bullets sang off the track around me, and then something sharp and unyielding went into my ribs, stitched a line up to my shoulder. I finally got free, to see that I was in the process of being unmade by the newly awakened factory. The track had traveled a good bit while I was struggling with it, and the tortoise was too far away to be much more than a nuisance. It was the factory itself that I had to worry about.

  This part of the track was the most heavily populated with machinery. There was no friendly shore to hop off, no clearance on either side of the track. Engine after engine lurched at me, some still wrapped in the burning remains of their covers, some so far out of balance that they were just twisting and thrashing at the conveyor. I ducked under an array of fitting arms and right-sizers. And then one of the machines downtrack of me stopped its assault, seized up and collapsed across the track. Like a branch across a river, and I grabbed for it. The metal was still hot, and bits of smoldering linen burned my skin, but I pulled myself free of the track and onto the machine. Gasping for my breath in the smoke-thick air, I slumped onto the factory floor and lay there, looking up at the ceiling and wondering how I'd gotten to this horribly uncomfortable stage in life. Wasted childhood, perhaps. I know there's some way to blame my father for all this. Surely.

  Groaning, I pushed myself into a sitting position and looked around. I had no idea where Wilson had gotten to, where the girl was, or how I was going to get out of here. The Badge was everywhere. Although none of them could see me, I could hear them calling out to each other, tightening their search. The machine-voice was still booming incoherently over the cacophony of the awakened factory. I got to my heels, squatted and drew my revolver. At least I still had that. I looked up, into the eyes of the iron girl.

  She was hidden in the lee of a particularly large machine. It was all boiler and flywheel, the moving parts safely on the other side of the engine. She was folded neatly into the gap below the tank. It must be terribly hot there, but she didn't seem to mind. What she did seem to mind, however, was my attention. It seemed like she was glaring at me, through those matte black lenses. Impossible to tell, really.

  I yelped and stood, bringing the iron up to fire. She was on me in a breath, slapping the revolver to the side and striking across my chest and legs. Treated me just like she had the control panel, each movement as if she had choreographed and practiced it her whole life. Fist came down on my leg moments before I was able to balance on it, elbow against my throat a heartbeat before I could yell, knee striking forearm once, twice, each blow disrupting my aim just enough to keep the barrel of my gun away from her. I fired anyway, but the blast did more to distract me than to bother her. Finally she set her heel behind my leg and shoved me in the hips and shoulder, and I was impossibly overbalanced. As I went down she snatched the pistol from my flailing arm. I was on my back, looking up at my own pistol.

  She stood there for a moment. I finally detected the slight movement of breath in her chest. So she was alive, at least. A pleasant change, considering the last day. When she was done glaring down at me, she flipped the revolver in her hand, slapped the chamber open and emptied the shells harmlessly onto my face. Then she brought her hands together, did something complicated, and when she spread her arms again the pieces of my revolver scattered across the floor. Like a party trick. With her hands still wide, she backed away. Right into Wilson's tackle.

  The anansi came over the top of the big boiler she had been hiding under, the six long, thin limbs that sprouted from his back carrying him up and over the cast iron dome. His regular hands were empty, and his clothes looked a little charred. Must have been working on the door when the Badge made their appearance in force. The din of the factory drowned out the sound of his approach. He pounced, as only a spider can.

  He hit her in stride, and they went down in a heap of legs and iron. She rolled to her feet, but Wilson swiped them away, first one then the other. She did this odd hopping dance, regaining one foot as he took the other, three or four times as he kept striking and she kept recovering. It would have been funny if not for the look on Wilson's face, the frustration and fear. Finally he gave up on unbalancing her and turned his many-armed attention to doing the girl harm. Eight arms in all, six tipped in sharp talons, two hard as rocks. Something about anansi bones made them super dense. For all that Wilson was a tall, skinny, bookish looking guy, he was incredibly strong. And that strength came out and he struck with the six arms that hung over his shoulders, each one darting in, only to be brushed aside by the girl's close defense. She didn't move an inch more than she had to, deflecting each attack with armored forearms or the knife-edge of her hands. Each talon that flashed past her whipped back to strike again, to be deflected again, to whip back again. It was dizzying to watch.

  The iron girl was moving backwards, herded by the ferocity of Wilson's attack. Smoke was getting heavy in the air. Something was burning, and not just scraps of sheet and cranky gearshafts. I rolled heavily to my feet, abandoned the dissected remains of my stolen revolver, and tried to find something that could make a difference in the dazzling melee that was going on before me. Needn't have worried. I heard a shout and looked up to see Wilson drawing back, bloody on the tip of one of his talons. His eyes were on fire with hungry triumph. The iron girl's sleeve was torn, the dark tan skin bene
ath gashed open. Wilson howled and redoubled his attack.

  Several more blows landed in the next few breaths. The iron girl was tiring, pushing the attacks farther away than was absolutely necessary. Hard to imagine using this word to describe the nearly mechanical precision of her actions, but she was getting sloppy, and Wilson was taking advantage.

  It was the Badge that saved her, and nearly finished us all. The two combatants were making enough noise now to draw the attention of even the most casual of patrolmen; the guys coming at us in riotplate were not terribly casual. They ignored me and set up a firing line on the other side of the assembly track. They couldn't have had more than an obscured view of the fight, but it was enough to convince them this was one of those 'shoot first, questions later' kind of situations. They shot.

  I mentioned the boiler. It was big, iron. Incredibly old. Iron enough that the first two slugs did nothing more than flake rust and dimple the skin. Old enough that the third, fourth and tenth slugs went inside. Inside, where the fire was. The fire came out. Rapidly.

  Wilson and the iron girl both turned their heads when the first shots impacted the boiler. Situational awareness, they call that. I saw them looking concerned, and I've been around Wilson enough to know that his concern is my concern. When the acrobats-militant flipped out of the way and threw themselves to the ground, I did the same. The fire washed over me in a sheet of angry heat. It treated the rest of the factory poorly, including those riotplated Badgemen.

  It was all noise to me. Screaming, tearing metal, the rapid rush and roar of consumed air and guttering fire. Engines tearing free of their moorings to bounce playfully across the floor. More screaming. Wilson pulled me up, shook me. Looked concerned when I opened my eyes. He was talking but I couldn't hear anything over the din of the factory. I looked around the floor. Dimpled concrete where there had been machines. Fire where there had been Badgemen. Nothing where there had been an iron girl.

  He shook me again. I got the idea. We had to go. Now.

  Chapter Six

  The Formal Engine

  I WAS IN worse shape than I thought. It took Wilson's help to get me through the wreckage of the factory floor to the ladder that led up to the catwalk. The building was still surrounded. We might have made it out in the smoke and the confusion, but the Badge was keeping the fire brigade away from the flames, so they were pretty serious about the cordon. Don't know why they wanted us so badly.

  Wilson got me to the ladder and followed up to the roof. Sections of the steel sheeting had already fallen in, and pillars of smoke were climbing out of the building. We crawled carefully to one of the alley-side edges and peered down. Badge, all over the place.

  "I can make the jump," Wilson said, as if there was ever any doubt. "You?"

  "I don't know," I said. My leg was numb, and something was throbbing in my hip. Probably nothing broken, but still. Pain. That would have been embarrassing. Broken hip, jump like my great aunt Ada. "I'm pretty banged up."

  Wilson looked nervously around the building. More of the roof was collapsing, more smoke pouring out. Clouds of cinder swirled up from the shattered skylights, like swarms of burning insects. I thought of the dry husks that littered the floor down there, and the eruption of maker beetles from the body. This was going to lead to some weird dreams, I could tell.

  "They're not going to let us off the roof any other way," Wilson said. I realized he'd been talking for a while. "So either we jump, or we signal them and surrender."

  "Or we do both," I said. He gave me a look.

  "You take the mask and get out of here. Keep it away from the girl. I can't help but think that she's the one Crane was expecting." I rolled over onto my back and closed my eyes. "I'm going to stay here. Turn myself in to the Badge. We haven't really done anything wrong."

  "You think that matters to the Badge?" Wilson asked.

  "No. But it'll matter to the Council. If anyone can talk their way out of something like this, it's me. And honestly, there are some people in the Council I'd like to talk to. Some questions I'd like to ask." I rubbed the ash out of my eyes and grimaced. "Some folks in that chamber know more than a little about things Celestean."

  "You sure you're going to be okay?"

  "Oh yeah. Ruined my leg, almost got eaten by a bunch of dead river people, talked to a man full of insects, discovered an ancient and possibly homicidal artifact." I gave him a big thumbs up. "I'm going to be great!"

  "Your enthusiasm is admirable," Wilson said with a thin smile. "Well. Don't fall thirty feet into the burning factory. Though the falling part would probably kill you, I'd hate for your dad to have to bury a pile of ashes in your memory."

  "You are the courage-maker, Wilson."

  He thumped me on my shoulder, then scrambled across the roof and onto the next building. I watched until he disappeared around a chimney. When he was good and gone, I pulled myself to the lip of the roof and yelled down.

  "Gentlemen of the Badge! I have come to terms with the inevitability of my capture. Please stop burning buildings in my pursuit!" A handful of faces looked up at me. None of them moved. "I surrender," I said to emphasize the point. "And please get a ladder. This roof is getting hot."

  WHEN PEOPLE FIRST came to the Veridon delta on the river Reine, they found things. Old things. Mostly it was buried buildings and broken machines and an undeniable heaviness to the air that made the place feel like a museum that had been cracked open and laid out to the sky. And some of the people who came to the delta found a way to use some of those things. My many-times great grandfather, for example, uncovered a buried furnace as big as several houses, and managed to harness the power to fuel the initial boom of the city of Veridon. That was our ticket into politics, got our name on the Founder's Charter, our seat on the first Council of Veridon. The Tombs used to have a different name, something to do with fishing or shipping. I forget. But then old Patron Tomb made his deal and then didn't die, and people changed the way they talked about the family. We even changed their name on the Charter. That's how we treat history, here in Veridon. Something to be mined, and changed, and used. That's how we treat everything.

  We found other things, too. Living things, or at least undying things. The Celestes. Seven of them, spread out across the delta. They looked like people, their features a little more perfect than we could imagine, their skin whiter than any of ours would ever be. Like light, sculpted onto their bones. They hovered above the ground, oblivious to the dirty-faced crowds of the early Veridians, gathered around. We gave them names. The Singer, The Watchman, The Warrior, The Mourning Bride, The Forgotten Love, the Queen Alone. And the Eternal, who looked dead and yet animate, the blow to his chest going all the way to his heart; and yet his eyes watched you steadily, no matter where you stood.

  We called them gods. We worshiped them, scryed by them, studied them, formed false histories or revealed narratives. We named them Celestes. This was their city, and we thanked them for the gifts they had left behind. There were priests, and an infrastructure of rite and ritual that went along with the name. It was Veridon's first religion.

  Others came and went, but the Celestes remained. Even the Artificers challenged their influence for a while, making a temple of the Academy and a ritual of the contemplative life. Oddly, it was a new religion that was not yet a religion that ended that. It was called The Algorithm at the time, a new group that was studying certain debris that could be gathered from the river. Together with the priesthood of the Celestes, they denounced the practices of the Artificers, their study of the dead and the living, of the lines that crossed between those worlds. It was a Council decree that ended the Guild, signed by three hands. The Lord of the Council, the Highest of the Celestean Sight, and the Master Wright of the Algorithm.

  Later, The Algorithm took on the name Church, and slowly drove worship of the Celestes out of the minds of Veridon. Not by condemnation, or decree, but by apathy and forgetfulness. The Church of the Algorithm offered real glories, in the form of cogwor
k and machination, clothed in the language of miracles. Eventually it was their narrative that became the history of Veridon, a story about a girl who was an angel, swept down the river until she was rescued by the Wrights of the Algorithm. They healed her with what they had learned from the river, and she was so grateful that she showed them the true mysteries of the Algorithm. That was the history we all accepted.

  And the Celestes were forgotten. Their domes still stand, but their priests are gone. The Wrights of the Algorithm have gathered such influence that, although there is no law against the Celestean Sight, no one who aspires to power or riches will admit to worshiping the ancient mysteries. And yet there are some, behind closed doors, in secret rooms, who keep the old ways. Who light heavy candles that smell like hot sand, and trace their fingers over icons that have been with their families for as long as anyone can remember. There are still adherents, though they hide. There are still those who know the old languages, the old rites.

  My father, for example. Alexander Burn, last of his line, and Councilor of the city of Veridon.

  THEY TOOK ME to an old lockup and put me away. I don't know if any of my guards recognized me. Don't know if they would have treated me better or worse if they did, and I didn't feel like pressing the point. Having a father on the Council should have gotten me certain rights with the Badge. Having been disowned by a father who sat on the Council was another matter.

  I hurt, that kind of low grade ache that felt like a hangover or the flu or like my skeleton had been used as a tuning fork. Or all of those things. Shoulder was pretty bad, too. At least it wasn't my shooting arm, but it was my lean-against-the-wall-looking-casual arm, so I was sitting on the bench muttering when the duty-officer came in to talk to me. Well. To yell at me.