The Waking Engine

by David Edison

  Asher reached out and grabbed the corner of the lorry as it rolled by, stepping up onto the footman’s perch. Cooper just stood there, gaping as wordlessly— as he had earlier that morning on the hill above Displacement—watching the carriage speed away with the tall gray- skinned man who had been Cooper’s only hope.

  “Don’t forget all we talked about,” Asher called out. “You’ll need it.”

  2

  My friend Lao-tzu says, “Darkness within darkness. The gateway to all understanding.”

  Of course Lao doesn’t mean the absence of light, you’ll see that. No, all of his friends appreciate that Lao-tzu finds freedom in that ultimate ignorance we all must face eventually: death. But I was raised to believe in a god who died for my sins. Of course I never believed in sin, and when death never came I had nothing left to pretend to believe.

  It is like that everywhere, you’ll discover. Names for gods that never existed or who lied about what they were, or disappeared ages and ages ago. Tedious ends to tedious pedagoguery, but there you have it.

  My friend Lao-tzu also says, and I think him terrifically wise for pointing it out, that names are a waste of time. “The unnamable is the eternally real,” he tells me, and I do think he’s right about that. “Naming is the origin of all particular things.” This means something a little profound, obviously, because it suggests that “things” can never be real.

  Was that ever truer than in the case of worship?

  Who is Christ on the cross to me now? I haven’t seen him at any of the parties.

  —Truman Capote,Better Birds

  Sesstri Manfrix sat at her desk, watching the ink dry on another page of another journal and holding her quill in her hand like a poisonous spider. Everything was so different here. The City Unspoken was like nowhere she’d ever lived, and as much as the filth and decay offended her senses, she knew she’d make more discoveries here than in any library she’d ever scoured. There was enough history and unspeakable age here to fill a thousand ruined cities and still have mystery to spare.

  It was an historian’s nirvana. Or her nightmare.

  And then there was Asher.

  When she met him, murdering books in a library, he’d been awkwardly formal, and Sesstri had been too keen to work out the etiology of his colorless skin to notice the intensity of Asher’s gaze. Yes, she would accept payment to help him with his research. Yes, she would be interested in knowing the subject matter. Yes, she was well versed in any number of disciplines pertaining to metaversial anthropology, and panspermic linguistics, and no, she did not mind legwork. She would like to hear about what concerned him, and no she felt very safe in the company of a strange man—though those last had been a lie and a lie of omission, respectively. Of course Sesstri felt safe; she bristled with hidden knives, razors, pins.

  Sesstri had learned to mistrust reactions based upon her beauty. In her last life, she’d discovered old age with a kind of relieved exhaustion. When she’d walked into this house, shaky on the arm of the curly redhead who’d found her, who’d rented her the home, and she had gotten a look at herself in the mirror, she’d almost screamed. In the weeks she’d worked with Asher, poring over worm-eaten texts that all but crumbled in their fingers, Sesstri had caught glimpses of that infatuated look in the gray man’s eyes, and knew that it would only be a matter of time until he— and by extension, she—had to deal with it.

  But he’d trusted her, enough to finally relent and show her what frightened him so. Asher took her to Godsmiths, crossing one of the city’s ever-present gargantuan chains, secured as a catenary bridge across the sundered earth of the gloomy district, and Sesstri wondered what the ramshackle ruin of a neighborhood contained that could possibly animate Asher with such fervor.

  In Godsmiths they found the svarning. Just the smallest, lightest touch of it, but enough for proof-of-concept. The day had been sunless, a bright white sky empty except for the constant moonrise of the Dome to the east, its inner glow dimmed by the day.

  “There is a word for this.” He pointed to the emaciated women, standing rigid at their doors, staring toward the Dome. The stains on their trousers or beneath their skirts hinted at the length of time they’d been standing there. Many had milky eyes because of dead corneal tissue; they hadn’t blinked in days.

  “There is no word for this.” Sesstri stood by the circle of dancing girls, scribbling notes on her pad as fast as she could. There was no point trying to intervene; that was not their purpose. But it was difficult for her to see the page; although the air was clear, her vision wavered, as with tears or intense emotion, though she had neither.

  Asher told her the word.

  The little girls’ hands bled where their nails dug into one another’s palms. They skipped with an exhausted gait, but their eyes were full of cheer. Horrible, agonizing cheer. They had moved beyond joy and pain into an extremity of feeling that conjured its own toxic magic. That was the svarning. Little girls who danced to the point of death and beyond, and beyond, and beyond.

  But those were not the stakes. Braided tits of the horse mother, those were an example of the bare minimum casualties, not even a full outbreak. Asher promised that the svarning would evolve, not just from person to person but changing in aspect as it grew. When or if that mania seized the city, if it spread throughout the worlds . . . would the metaverse detonate in some kind of psychic supernova? Or would the cogs of existence run ever hotter, ever faster, and its fevered inhabitants spin on in an ever-more-tortured eternal life?

  The plan was that Cooper was supposed to be someone special. The plan involved someone special leading them to a solution, somehow, somewhere. That’s what Asher had promised her, however he knew, and she had promised to find and identify this special someone.

  So why had she lied?

  Sesstri stared out the window, over papers and books, to the towers of abandoned districts that burned like candles of stone, glass, and steel. Though they burned night and day, they never fell, and were held by undead masters who manifested as clouds of roiling darkness streaked through with red lightning, an ever-brewing storm above ever-burning skyscrapers. The gangs that worshiped undeath like a god had run those districts even before the government withdrew into the Dome— but now whole sections of the city seethed with black-clad youths engaged in constant battle against each other and the City Unspoken. Despite the untapped trove of history she knew lay within those impossible towers, Sesstri hadn’t ventured anywhere near them, yet.

  She’d learned from her contacts in Amelia Heights, from the artists and the artisans who still clung to their homes there, about the power of the forces marshaling around those towers. The gangs, collectively called the Undertow, had acquired something since the prince’s absence, some power or leverage that allowed their influence to grow: the liches, undead spellcasters with human intelligence and ambition, had either grown in number or flocked to the City Unspoken from elsewhere, filling a power vacuum. Their thralls—well, the youths had swelled in numbers to an even greater degree, and while the Death Boys and Charnel Girls weren’t undead themselves, they’d tasted something of it, and it gave them power. The names they’d given themselves along rudimentary gender lines, Death Boys and Charnel Girls, they seemed silly names to her, but as a collective the thugs posed a real threat to the declining stability of the city.

  And yet, the Undertow were only a symptom. The Dome, which dwarfed even the flaming towers and smoldered with a different light— gold and green, full of life—it worried her far more than a little army of children and monsters. Armies were finite. The damage to the City Unspoken, decapitated from its leadership, was much harder to quantify. Anarchy during crisis yielded nothing good.

  She didn’t quite trust Asher, despite wanting to. And she wanted him, despite not trusting herself one bit.

  If only she hadn’t lied about Cooper. If only Asher had possessed the good sense not to trust her, or the kindness not to take the boy to the Guiselaine and leave her to pond
er her error. She didn’t understand the pallid man—maybe that was why she felt so odd in his presence, as if she weren’t quite as brilliant as usual—more spiteful, less gracious.

  She’d told Asher everything but the crucial fact. She’d identified from the construction and branding of Cooper’s clothing alone that his entire culture was childborn. There was a certain solipsistic air about civilizations that were illiterate to their larger metaversial context—her homeworld had been no different in that regard.

  But if Asher knew that Cooper had a navel . . . He’d be furious, but she’d been certain she would think of an answer before they returned. Nobody who’d died had a navel, only the childborn, for as long as they lived in their first flesh—only they had that scar, that connection to their mother and their first, only, literal birth. Sesstri put her hand to her own belly, flat and hard and perfectly smooth. She didn’t like to think about her navel, or how she’d lost it.

  But the more Sesstri considered the question, the less certain she grew that there was an answer to Cooper’s arrival—or at least, no answer that she could uncover with mere perspicacity. No, the more she considered it, the less sense Cooper made. A navel. He was an erratum, to be sure, growing ever more erratic, and Sesstri’s conviction that Cooper was worthless faltered.

  What would she have done if Asher hadn’t left the room before she’d stripped the foundling? How could she admit to him that she had no idea how such a thing was possible? To commute between worlds without death as your oarsman was impossible for lesser beings. For a godlike being—one of the First People—or an incredibly powerful mortal, certainly, but for a childborn young man like Cooper to wake up intact in his original body, the body of his childbirth? Sesstri couldn’t explain that.

  And she had no intention of telling Asher the truth until she could.

  She walked the empty house, worried. Sesstri never worried. And she never lied to a client. So she was doubly distressed as she climbed the stairs of her little house south of Ruin and the Boulevard of Wings, staring at the vase of wilted foxgloves that sat by the landing’s small oriel window. Her day had devoured itself this way, aimlessly, and nothing could be less typical of Sesstri Manfrix than aimlessness.

  Of course it was more than Cooper—there was the svarning, which she could feel prickling at her skin and getting stronger every day. The Dying pilgrims were growing in number; they found it harder and harder to Die, and that worried Asher. As it should—the mass Deathlessness brought on a malaise that was partly psychological and partly paranormal, and entirely unpredictable. It infected the young as easily as the old, as if the air itself were tainted by the rotting souls of those who should be Dead. Svarning: a word from a language with no known descendants that was either ancient beyond reckoning or entirely fictional. If the word was real, Sesstri had translated its meaning as lying somewhere between “heartsick” and “drowning,” and occasionally “illuminated,” although the degree to which those interpretations were valid would be open to debate.

  Death. Undeath. Power. Svarning. Sesstri wasn’t disturbed by any of that—it was all grist for the mill of her mind. All part of her work. Like many of the metaverse’s persevering geniuses, Sesstri Manfrix hadn’t let the interruptions of death disrupt her studies. Instead she’d expanded the scope of her investigations to include an existence punctuated by periodic transmigration—through death—and found that what she lost in continuity she more than recouped through longevity. Her second life had been fortuitous: peaceful and providing access to many notes and records of the larger metaverse of which she had been so ignorant throughout her first life. In the reality that called itself Desmond’s Pike, Sesstri had raised a family and researched the metaverse and its primary method of transportation: dying.

  What’s death to an historian who never dies? What’s history to an eternal woman? Even after apocalyptic war came to Desmond’s Pike, with gold machines that fell from the sky and disassembled the world one atom at a time, Sesstri knew that she’d have the luxury to answer her questions at her own pace. Now her limitless learning appeared threatened by the rise of the svarning. So she’d solve it. One woman against a metaphysical illness that threatened all universes? Of course she could solve it.

  Other questions were less forgiving. What’s love to a woman who’d never met her equal? What, for that matter, is love? The browning foxgloves didn’t answer; they only raised further questions. Why hadn’t she refilled the water in the vase?

  Oh, Asher.

  She’d lied because Asher frightened her, and Sesstri had decided at a young age never to be frightened of a man. Her father the Horse lord had taught her that much, at least. She would solve the problem of Asher after she’d unraveled the threat to the metaverse.

  The matter at hand: Cooper hadn’t traveled here by himself; he smelled of no grand magics and heralded no invading army or technological superiority. He was as mundane as it got. That left few options, all of which pointed to the one subject that made Sesstri uncomfortable: the First People. Gods, the ignorant called them. She had no use for such charlatanism, and while there was no arguing the existence of any number of beings who were— or chose to remain—unfathomable to humankind and the other races of the Third People, there were no true gods in the absolute sense of the word, merely players of a larger game, with a wider reach and deeper pockets. They might be beyond mortal ken, but that was due to mortal limitations rather than a MacGuffin called divinity. Name them what you will, Sesstri felt, but worship was a waste of good incense.

  She packed her satchel. She might as well get some work done, and as long as she had worship on her mind, she could catalog some more of antidogmatic stories told in and about the City Unspoken. She could sort through drivel about gods and goddesses and find truth there, somehow.

  What truly irritated Sesstri was the idea that any knowledge might be barred to her because she was somehow lesser, and this struck her as the ultimate copout. Not to mention insulting. Give me a week in the library of a goddess, she knew, and I’ll come out with conclusions. Give me an hour with a demiurge and I’ll return with citations and cross-references that are perfectly analogous to any other quarter of historical or empirical study.

  What’s a god but a man behind a curtain?

  Curtains burn.

  For a while after Asher left him in the Guiselaine, Cooper didn’t really pay attention to where he wandered. Dead, abandoned, alone, and lost— it made his chest tight and his eyes too watery to see well. By the time he could breathe, he’d found himself hassled on a dusty thoroughfare where everyone seemed to be in a hurry and nowhere seemed an acceptable place to be. He found an exception in a clearing at the side of the road, where pedestrians went out of their way to avoid what looked like a wounded airman from the First World War, hiding in a barrel of beer.

  “Hi there.” Cooper said, peering down into the beer. “Are you, by any chance, from a place called Earth?”

  “Nerp,” the pilot bubbled.

  Cooper nodded, aiming for sanguinity and missing. “So you’re not a fighter pilot from the First World War? The Great War, I guess you would have called it, only you wouldn’t have, since you’re not from it. From there. From Earth.”

  “Nerp.”

  “Ah. I see.” He tried again. “It’s just that you’re dressed a lot like a fighter pilot.”

  The man lifted his head out of the beer enough to shake his head. “Oh, I’m a fighter pilot. That’s why I’m dressed like one. I’ve just never been to Erp.”

  “Earth.”

  “Sky!” the pilot cheered. “I like this game. Your turn.”

  “Um.” Cooper nodded again. “Why are you hiding in a barrel of beer?”

  “I’m not hiding.”

  “You’re not?”

  “Nerp. I’m drowning myself in beer. It’s the thing to do.”

  Cooper almost pointed out that drowning oneself in drink was not supposed to be a literal thing, but he remembered Asher’s admonitions and
checked himself. Perhaps, in the City Unspoken, death by beer was perfectly acceptable. That wouldn’t be the weirdest thing Cooper had learned today.

  “Where do the lost go?” Cooper asked the pilot, not intending to sound like a confused fortune cookie. The man sank a little, and his answer was not intelligible.

  “I’m sorry, I don’t quite follow.” Cooper squinted his face and squeaked out an imposition: “Might you be willing to stop drowning for just another moment? I really am very, very lost.”

  With a sigh of superheroic effort, the pilot stood up in his barrel, raining lager onto the cobbled gutter, pointed down the road, and said: “Bridge. Music. Mountain.” And then, as if to clarify: “Over bridge, through music, under mountain.”

  Then the pilot replaced his aviator’s goggles, tugged at the red beads clustered at his suntanned throat, and submerged himself in beer again. One hand emerged from the pale yellow foam like a parody of the Lady of the Lake, holding an oversized beer stein brimming with ale. Cooper didn’t stand on ceremony—he took the proffered pint and walked away as swiftly as his feet would carry him. He had the pint halfdrained by the time he rounded the bend. Afterlife beer was stronger than he’d expected.

  So when he stumbled, drunk, from the bridge built of giants’ bones and reinforced concrete, Cooper hoped he saw what the beer-marinated fighter pilot with the red beads had described. He faced a pointed hill, odd and steep, where the crust of the city had been pushed up like an anthill or a volcano, wrinkling the weft of the architecture around it.

  A road led down into a park, then continued on below and through the tall hill, which Cooper supposed might be the mountain in question. In the distance the Dome loomed, a planetoid moments away from collision.

  Cooper stumbled toward the park, a nestled vale of cypress and stranger trees, rangy blue-tipped eucalyptus, curly willows whose curls spilled upward. Beyond the park, the road dipped beneath the mountain, dark as a funnel spider’s web.