The Waking Engine

by David Edison

  An overgrown drum circle seemed to have set up semipermanent camp in the park—dominated by a profusion of musicians and singers who sat atop or leant against a length of massive chain that seemed more or less draped across the park. The tolling of bells that had followed him all day grew louder, but didn’t seem to dampen the orchestral spirit of the gatherers. An odd little musical collective played a dozen tunes at once and each drew its own audience, using the oversized chain links as performance spaces and stages, or for seating.

  Away from the tidal force of the streets of the Guiselaine, Cooper found the presence of mind to closely examine the throng for the first time. The people who arranged themselves according to the links of huge chain seemed plucked from a dozen countries and eras. A dozen worlds. A mule-eared busker juggled pomegranates in one hand while playing a brass horn with the other, and he winked at Cooper with overlarge eyes as he passed. A few chain links down, a trio of women with bared breasts and faces painted like Chinese princesses arranged sheaves of music on the shelves of a kiosk, singing in three-part harmony.

  What are those chains for? Cooper mused. He’d seen them from Sesstri’s rooftop running through canals and alleyways. They cut through the city, but whatever purpose they might once have served seemed forgotten, or at least buried.

  Cooper burped loudly and tasted beer— a shaven-headed man with a chest scrimshawed in scars clapped and gave him a thumbs-up before going back to pounding out rhythm on the skin of his drum. Cooper gawped at the muscles dancing in the man’s torso; in his stupor the scars seemed to wink like the faces in the bark of an ancient tree. One of the painted princesses broke away from her sisters to rest her hand upon the scrimshawed man’s shoulder, leaning over from behind to kiss his cheek. The rough-looking man leered at her appreciatively, still drumming, and rubbed his beard against her peach nipple, inhaling the perfume of her breasts with a familiar relish.

  “Beautiful, ain’t she?” he asked when he saw Cooper look a moment too long.

  “Oh. Yes.” Cooper scratched his head. “Absolutely, yes.”

  Taking in his surroundings with an equanimity only the inebriated can command, Cooper made his way through the crowd of listeners and performers. Once he would have given an arm to step through a doorway into an otherworldly carnival, but now all he could do was look for an ATM sign. It was a compulsive reflex in a head not quite as prepared for total world-upheaval as it might once have fancied itself.

  Shaking off his ghosts, Cooper thought that he hadn’t intended to get drunk, but couldn’t convince himself that he wished he were sober. It was that damn fighter pilot’s fault, anyway.

  Under mountain. Cooper looked up to see the rise of tilted buildings climbing up the near distance. It seemed that all the houses and rookeries could come sliding down on all their heads at any moment. The lane dipped at an easy angle, and as he left the music behind, Cooper smelled incense and dinner being fixed within nearby homes. Garlic, onion, meat— and from the descending path he followed, sandalwood, cedar, amber.

  The steps were carved in a shallow decline on either side of a wide ramp intended for handcarts and rickshaws, and Cooper stumbled past townhouses and tenements in a succession of levels until the narrow ribbon of the sky was crisscrossed by a web of supports and rafters. Light spilled from open windows and the air chimed with the sounds of domesticity; he heard women argue with their husbands and children— children, of all things, the first sign of any recognizable natural order he’d seen in the City Unspecified. Cooper had assumed the city to be filled with old souls and death-seekers, but of course that wasn’t true. Not entirely. Life and death, side by side, formed the meat and sinew of the city, and gave rise to all sorts of things, grisly and familiar—mule- eared buskers, screaming toddlers, and bread dough rising in the oven of a top-heavy house on an avenue that dipped down, toward the buried center of this cone- shaped urban mountain.

  And it was buried thoroughly, that center. Cooper soon left the upper layer of habitations behind, passing through a stretch of abandoned buildings with empty windows and no smell at all except for dust, and dust, and dust. Here updrafts whistled over broken glass and murky casements; if he’d been sober, Cooper might have turned back, but drink had given him a measure of courage.

  Eventually the way overhead closed entirely and the street became a tunnel of rough bedrock that had been hewn and re-hewn over the years as the strange mountain grew. Daylight faded and was replaced by burning torches. Cooper no longer felt that he was in a city—he felt a hundred miles from anything, a lone intruder in a desert tomb, guided down, down, down into darkness. Water trickled from the walls, filtered by strata of history, sliming wet stripes of calciferous deposits onto the stone.

  When he’d walked down for so long that he feared the ground must soon swallow him up entirely, the tunnel opened via a cataract of stairs onto a broad courtyard. Looking up, Cooper realized he had hit the center of the mountain, and stood at the bottom of a deep cylindrical pit, a small circle of sky providing light from far above. Cobbled with smooth marble, the courtyard seemed far too clean and tidy to belong to the archeological layer cake through which he’d just descended. At the exact center of the courtyard was set a large metal crest, but the image it might have borne had been worn away entirely.

  What he saw next defied possibility. The circular wall of the courtyard was lined with archways, packed next to and atop one another: hundreds of façades, porticos, and gaping mouths of stone or brick were scrawled across the towering shaft, packed in one beside the other like books on a helical shelf. Cooper craned his neck to capture the scope of the place; drunken vertigo pulled at his gut as his eyes spiraled upward and he struggled to stay standing. Each darkened threshold stood starkly different from its neighbors—some were supported by massive columns, tattooed with scrollwork or crawling demons or formed from slabs of raw metal, while others were little more than clay bricks covered with paint and thatch.

  Cooper decided that the archways looked most like the gaping edifices of religious monuments: countless temples, churches, and shrines. The doorways—of all sizes, from mouths of humble driftwood to the Brobdingnagian gates of pillared cathedrals—were stacked together tightly and coiled up the walls of the cylindrical shaft. Many of the entrances bore what looked to be some sign of divinity: a fat stone woman holding her own engorged breasts, the baleful glare of a steel mask, the branches of a bone-carved world tree; on and on it wound, a small infinity of architecture. Stacked one atop the other in no apparent order, the walls crawled with portals and doorways and thresholds, yawning empty and black. His head spun faster as he moved into the center of the space, standing on the worn metal plaque at its middle, like a navel.

  The circle of sky hung distant, darkened but cloudless, a deep royal blue that seemed worlds away from the brooding umber sunset of the music fair he’d passed through to get here. Fragrant smoke of a dozen flavors poured from the many openings, scrolling upward toward the promise of starlight far above like a pilgrimage of ghosts. But Cooper could see that the darkened doorways were mere façades and nothing more—no vaulted tombs or flame-wreathed altars lay beyond their gaping doors. Cooper realized with nervous awe that he was standing at the bottom of an immense well lined with the faces of a hundred religions, scalped and mounted.

  From above sounded the tolling of a bell, quickly joined by another, and another, until the whole sinkhole was ringing with the tolling of countless bells, an infinity of church towers converging above Cooper’s ears. He hiccupped and sat down hard on one of the wide steps that led into the well, bruising his tailbone. Even with his hands flattened against his ears Cooper’s head still pounded with the army of bells, while his vision swam and he felt he would soon be ill. On and on they rang, and even when the tolling began to cease the well vibrated with painful echoes.

  Cooper held himself as still as possible until he could stand to hear again, the bells a second heartbeat in his chest.

  “Welcome to the
Apostery,” said a voice. “Where we bury our faith.”

  The Apostery.

  The name rang in Cooper’s head like a silver bell—the final note of the cacophony of the tolling he’d just endured—and he turned to see who had spoken. Something moved in the shadows. More than one thing, or one thing that made the sounds of many— a footstep to his left; the scuffle of gravel quickly silenced to the right; the quick sniffing sound of Cooper’s scent being tasted on the air. Something circled him.

  Cooper saw it as it spoke again, a figure in black lurking beneath the lintel stone of a nearby archway. He tried to position himself with his back to a wall, but stumbled and half fell against a column while his vision spun. Cooper fought down panic.

  “The Apostatic Cemetery,” the voice explained. “You came to hear the story?”

  Then he slunk out from the dark, angling toward Cooper with predatory speed. His kohl-rimmed eyes were hungry and as black as the plugs in his earlobes, his body slant-ribbed and white where it showed through his tattered clothes. Despite Cooper’s fear, he was trapped, rapt, unable to move. The youth stepped close and drew back his arm as if to gut Cooper with a dagger— but when his hand sprang forward the light from above struck no naked blade but a poppy, sepia red and fresh.

  Cooper blinked at the young man’s face, wondering if he could smell spilled beer. The stranger simply stood there, transfixing Cooper with his eyes.

  He was a birthday magician, and Cooper the rabbit in his hat.

  “For you,” he said with a smile. White teeth crooked at the center and a shy blush made his handsome face lovely. Beneath the slits in his shirt blue stars spread across his chest and arms, buffeted by tattooed winds and waves.

  Iamthesailorsstarstoguideyouhome. Iamtwinstorms of airandwatertodrownand freezeyou. Iwillhelpyou breathe when the sky has broken. Fear me, Cooper.

  Cooper heard the words in his head but paid them no mind. His attention was focused on the pair of agate eyes gazing deeply into his own, as though the two of them were not standing beneath the glare of countless dispossessed religions, but were alone in a corner somewhere loud and smoky where nothing existed but two pairs of eyes and two pairs of lips, getting closer.

  “I’m Marvin,” said the stranger as Cooper took the poppy from his hand. Their fingers touched; Marvin’s skin was warm and dry and felt for all the world like the most amazing thing Cooper had encountered since he arrived in this doomed city.

  “I’m Cooper.”

  Silence. Comfortable silence, Cooper had half a mind to notice. For lack of an alternative, he tucked the flower behind his ear. Marvin had another tattoo inside his lower lip, but Cooper couldn’t make it out.

  “You came for the story?” Marvin asked again, more shyly, his earlier aggressiveness now evaporated in the face of, what? Something mutual. Something unexpected.

  “Why are you talking to me?” Cooper asked, immediately wishing he hadn’t sounded so defensive.

  Marvin looked as uncertain as Cooper felt, and Cooper wondered if maybe he wasn’t the only lost boy in this city. “I . . . I thought you looked like you could use a friend.” It didn’t sound very convincing, but it had the desired effect.

  “Oh.” Cooper hung his head, now wishing he hadn’t taken the stein of ale and drained it so quickly. “I’m sorry. I just got here—”

  “—I can tell—”

  “—and I’m a little on guard, to say the least. I’m also a little bit tipsy. You said something about a story?”

  Marvin nodded. “It’s all they do down here, tell stories. Since you’re new you wouldn’t know it, but the Apostery is one of the oldest places in the city. It grows all the time. Whenever a faith dies out, so they say. The pilgrims and locals both come here to remember the songs they used to sing, back when they had something to sing about.” Marvin thought about what he’d said, and made a face. “It’s kind of fascinatingly pathetic, I think.”

  “Pilgrims?” Cooper asked as Marvin led him across the cobbled floor of the city’s navel, toward the only archway that was more than a shallow front.

  “The Dying,” Marvin answered simply, as if that were obvious.

  “That place is amazing.” Cooper marveled as Marvin led him past the opening of plain rock into another passageway, a darkened progress that led on beyond the well of faiths.

  “That?” Marvin said. “That was just the courtyard.”

  Nixon ran along the canal even though the edge was barely as wide as one of his feet. The other children wouldn’t dare, but it was the fastest way between Rind and Ruin south of Lindenstrasse, and Nixon couldn’t go into Lindenstrasse until the shops closed or he’d find himself hanging upside down from a thievespole. One too many apples snatched too boldly from the greengrocers’ tony displays had earned him a bad reputation in the neighborhood.

  Nixon could cope with a bad reputation. Most of the other street children avoided him like the plague. Some were afraid of kids who did business, and that was probably for the best. The others, the ones like him . . . they ran their own rackets. If he’d learned one thing since he’d come to the city, it was to keep his nose out of other peoples’ games: impossible things happened here every day, and few of them were anything but awful.

  And yet, the City Unspoken had given Nixon a golden opportunity for what he considered quite possibly the finest grift the metaverse had to offer: juvenile reincarnation.

  It was true that without intervention of some kind, the soul of a person who died would transmigrate elsewhere, guided more by its own incurable nature than any cosmic plan, and would clothe itself in flesh that reflected the spirit’s own self-image. Nixon represented one of the variant incarnations. Not the kind of folk who were just young at heart and tended to incarnate very young—no, Nixon and his fellow juvenile- incarnated anomalies were sick jokes: murderers and rapists and thieves of every caliber—generals, popes, and greedy opportunists. In a way, Nixon suspected that the young bodies into which they’d been incarnated represented an ultimate deviance of the soul—they may not see themselves as children, but each and every member of his loosely aligned group of reborn unboys and nongirls intuitively grasped the advantage of starting new lives dressed in the bodies of cherubs: it was the perfect scam. Less ambitious pseudochildren found employment between the sheets, but to Nixon’s eye that was a life better suited to the city’s three kinds of whores—the possibilities presented to a canny mind in a child’s body knew no limit.

  Take his current errand, for instance. The job was simple enough, but no regular kid could handle the employer. . . . Nixon scampered a little faster along the canal wall. It would not do to be late returning to the abandoned room, and the meeting should be over quickly enough— the ass end of a spy job rarely took long. All he’d need to do was nod. “Yes ma’am, miss crazy hair, I saw him, ma’am, clear as cut crystal.” Then grab the money and run.

  It was true, Nixon conceded, that there might be more glamorous or powerful lives to live—the endless bloody deaths of a Coffinstepper, for instance, hunting dangerous quarry across dozens of realities at once. Or the days of a plutocrat noble ruling a city with a stranglehold on the ultimate commodity. Those might be thrilling lives, but they weren’t his. Not yet.

  Nixon leaped over the boundary fence at the end of the canal and landed on Ruin Street without a sound. He dropped into a patch of sunshine, the street around him empty. The sun still shone overhead—the sky wasn’t sane yet, but it was on its way, and Nixon took a few seconds to enjoy the heat on his face and chest. That green sun would go away, he could feel it, and an honest sky would take its place. From Nixon’s vantage, the strangest thing about the City Unspoken—which was saying something—was its variable sky. Depending on the mood of the firmament, you’d wake up to any number of possible skies, and if it hadn’t changed by lunchtime, you counted yourself lucky.

  He patted his tan little belly and pictured the meal he’d buy himself with the coin he’d earn today. He pictured the sun he’d eat i
t under. Imagine that, Nixon marveled: honest coin, a yellow sun in a blue sky, and meat in a bowl at the end of the day. Life was good.

  He passed the building with the blue door and shimmied up its gutter to the second- story window, where the red ribbon was tied around a bent nail sticking out of the casement. The window was still open, and Nixon pulled himself into the abandoned room with a brave face. He wouldn’t let his legs shake this time, he promised himself as he felt his way through the boarded-up room and into the deeper darkness beyond, no matter how pretty the lady was, or how she burned the air just by standing in it.

  When the sudden flare of a lantern splintered the darkness, Nixon barely suppressed a squeal.

  In the hallway stood a small woman with a sweet face and red curls, who hung the lantern on the wall and smiled at Nixon. She wasn’t wearing any shoes, just a faded shift, and there were far more curves exposed than Nixon was usually allowed to see. A ribbon as red as the one on the windowsill adorned her ankle, and she lifted a lovely foot off the floor just slightly.

  “Did he come?” she asked. Her red hair moved like clouds across the sky, though the air was still.

  “Who are you?” He asked the question before he could stop himself. And what do you care about the gray hippie picking up some portly stiff?

  “Did he come?” she asked again. Nixon had the feeling this woman possessed extraordinary patience, but he couldn’t say why. She felt too real, was all he could think—the hairs on her forearm, the pucker of her lips, it was as if the rest of the world were a grainy film reel and she, a true woman, had stepped in front of the screen. Thing was, Nixon was pretty sure she was anything but a true woman. There were things that looked like people, he’d learned, but weren’t. Things that might even convince you they were gods— but they weren’t that, either.

  “I mean it,” he insisted, “I really need to know who you are.” He didn’t, but he wanted to be able to lord this story over the other gutter rats, and how could he do that if he never found out the identity of the slight little thing who brimmed with power?