The Waking Engine

by David Edison

  “It’s called a ‘vivisistor,’ poppet, and it produces an electric current derived from the slow death of the living thing trapped inside it.”

  “That is its function. Vivisistor.” She tasted the word. “What is its significance?”

  “What’s significant about generating power from life? Oh poppet, you ask all the right questions, but in the wrong order. You should feel horror where you feel only ambition, and I worry that if you do not feel it now at the beginning as you should, then you will feel it at the last, when it is too late for you to save yourself, and that breaks my worthless heart.” Tam thought the old man looked as if he meant it. He seemed sincere, at least.

  Lallowë hissed through her teeth. “Don’t fence with me now that you’ve begun to cooperate, Papa; we’re past that. There’s nothing remarkable about a battery, no matter how it generates current. There’s more to this ‘vivisistor’ than electricity, and I want to know what it is.”

  “ ‘I want, I want, I want.’ That’s all you know. It’s my fault, I suppose, for not supplementing your mother’s instruction with a modicum of the decency that is your human birthright.” He drew breath to continue, but his daughter denied him the opportunity.

  The third slap stung Lallowë’s palm, and Hinto Thyu was not so quick to raise his head this time. When he did, their matching eyes met and neither gave an inch of ground.

  “Do you feel better?” he asked her, very softly. “Does hurting me lessen the burden of your pain, my darling girl? If it does, I will gladly dangle here forever.”

  Lallowë cursed in faerie-tongue, obscene birdsong chiming the air. “Why do you torment me?” she demanded, a thread of shrillness in her voice betraying the girl she must once have almost been. “And where did Mother find it?”

  Hinto Thyu looked down at his tortured carcass. He tried to shrug, but his brutalized muscles wouldn’t permit it. “Because I am a terrible father, I suppose.” Then, tears in his failing eyes, he broke.

  “Your mother uncovered the technology de cades ago, shortly before the troubles with Death began.” He paused, watching his daughter’s face. Tam could not imagining feeling anything but fear for Lallowë Thyu, but this man only ever offered love. Did he know how that would torture her? Was the father as cruel, in his way, as the child?

  “ ‘Troubles with Death.’ So you know about that, do you?” It was a cheap question—anyone paying half a mind to the foot traffic in the City Unspoken would notice that the ranks of the Dying swelled daily. But no one seemed to be paying half a mind these days; there was a frantic energy, a distraction in the air.

  Hinto kept quiet, though his face looked woeful. Three years of dying daily, he’d kept his secrets. Tam did not think that Hinto Thyu would ever spill them all.

  Lallowë pressed a nail against the thin skin above her father’s collarbone, hard enough to draw blood. “I knew you knew more than you let on, but not why. Why do you know so much, Papa? Did Mother tell you this, so long ago, before you left us?”

  Her father looked at the floor when he answered, staring down at his own blood, both dried and fresh. “I don’t hate your mother, Lallowë. I don’t wish her harm—that, and I worry that the harm will not be limited to the Cicatrix alone. Please murder me again, but promise me that when the moment comes, you will save yourself.”

  She promised him nothing but pain, and kept her word. The old man bellowed.

  “You’re leaving something out.” Lallowë brushed his whis kers, now, mimicking tenderness as best she could. “Keep your sources if you’d rather scream than sing, but tell me what you know of the devices. Finish this.”

  “The vivisistor combines several arcane disciplines with some technological fields that should not be compatible with one another, let alone with spellwork. Perhaps you might meditate further upon the implications of such a feat.”

  “Perhaps I might do, but I’d consider it a courtesy if my Papa would finish the bedtime tale he’s begun.” She picked his skin out from beneath her bright nails.

  Hinto sobbed and it seemed as though all the strength drained out of his body and into the cesspool at his feet. “I would expect no less from my darling girl. If I tell you that the vivisistors are nothing new, but something very old, and exceedingly dangerous, will you abandon your mother’s madness? I think not. And what if I tell you that the magics and sciences combined within the vivisistor seem to arise from disparate universes? Will you see reason and leave the folly of ancient madness to proper fools?”

  Lallowë’s eyes opened wide. “Mother works with technology from multiple realities? Successfully?”

  Hinto nodded imperceptibly. “Multiple realities, yes. Successfully? Well that, as always, depends on your definition.”

  “Oh Papa,” she breathed, considering the ramifications of successful duplication and integration of technology from several worlds at once. Tech from one world rarely worked on another—and conflicting magic systems could be even worse. Syncretistic innovation, truly building upon the resources of the metaverse—that kind of synthesis had always been deemed a myth. Even in places like the City Unspoken, where worlds mixed on the streets.

  “Your mother . . .” The old bard’s voice was hoarse. “You don’t have to become her, Lolly. There are as many possible futures as there are skies sheltering suns. Even the Cicatrix was beautiful, once, like a bower of daffodils. You remember her, don’t you? Before the scars. Before derangement, before she changed her name. Before the vivisistors she had installed within her own body.”

  Lallowë turned her head as her face crumpled. “Oh, oh, oh.” Now was her turn to sob. The manacle on Tam’s wrist burned like fire.

  “I thought you might appreciate the unlikelihood of such an achievement.”

  But Lallowë just wrung her hands. “Oh,” she repeated to herself, “Oh, Mother, what have you done?” Tam pictured the transformation of a beautiful faerie inserting perversions like this vivisistor inside her own body, eggs unborn into a monster’s abdomen. Little wonder their womb magic faltered.

  “Lolly . . .” Hinto Thyu began, seeming to hope he’d breached her defenses and touched the girl he’d known.

  But Lallowë blinked rapidly, squared her shoulders, and was again the indomitable Marchioness Terenz-de-Guises, icy and unflappable. The queen’s body would be precisely where she’d want the most powerful technology and the most monstrous of violations. Tam had hoped that they might be done with this unpleasantness, after Lallowë’s papa had yielded so many details about the vivisistors, but it seemed they’d only just begun.

  “Mother’s plans extend beyond her own amendments, I’ll wager. And I’ll wager twice as much that Papa’s learned how. Tam, assemble the seven-gauge exsanguinator process.” She was going to bleed him dry.

  “Mistress?” Tam stalled, having beached himself on his long- submerged humanity at last. He couldn’t, he just couldn’t. Besides, the old man had already told her what she wanted to know, hadn’t he? Tam couldn’t, but he would.

  “You should know better than anyone that coaxing a bird to sing is only the first step of the work, my Young Tam Lin. Now we must teach it the melodies we wish to hear.”

  As dawn broke over the lip of the bowl of black land that was the Bonsekisai district, Sesstri feared that Nixon had been right. Billows of bright red smoke looped up into the blue morning behind the great tree that rose from the center of the neighborhood. It looked like smoke, but was too red. Sesstri had a growing feeling in her gut that she’d missed something terribly obvious, and it all began with the color red. More damningly for the would-be- smoke, this was Bonseki-sai. Strange things happened in Bonseki-sai. Sesstri had awoken here, found by her scarlet-haired landlady. She hadn’t returned since.

  In Bonseki-sai, every building had been incorporated into a district- wide work of stagecraft, so Sesstri and Nixon hurried past blocks that rose and crested like stormy seas, miniature mountain peaks that were inns or coffee shops, and countless confabulations of succule
nts that grew larger here than they did anywhere else.

  “Why are we running toward the fire, bird?” Nixon asked, out of breath. “It’s not a fire.” Sesstri had decided that much. “It’s not even smoke.” The suns— suns, plural, today, bright and blue—raised themselves just high enough in the sky to send slanting rays of sunlight streaming behind them. Bonseki-sai at sunrise: it should have been a lovely sight, but was instead a horror.

  The black ground beneath their feet caught the angled light and was transformed by it—the dawn lit the turf like a jewel, and revealed the matte black surface to be translucent like honey-dark resin, murky but clear enough to see what lay below: countless bodies, floating as if drowned, preserved forever, mere inches underfoot.

  Far below the imprisoned dead, the drowned streets of an elder, previous district lay beneath fathoms of the resinous substance, visible only at dawn and dusk, shadowy blocks and buried towers stretching up toward Sesstri’s feet like huge fingers, drowned forever ago.

  “Have you ever met one of the First People, Nixon?” Sesstri asked, determined not to look down.

  “Have I—woah!” Nixon squealed and threw himself sideways, rolling onto a low red fence and clinging to it as if his life depended on it. “What happened to the ground?”

  Sesstri stopped and closed her eyes.

  “I hearda this but, shit, I never wanted to see it for myself.” Nixon sounded scared, but awe crept into his voice as he mastered the feeling of vertigo brought on by the dawn-lit streets of Bonseki-sai. “Poor bastards.” He set his feet down upon the amber ground, scraping the toes of one foot above the milky-eyed face of a dead man, whose mouth gaped forever in a wordless scream.

  “Yes,” Sesstri agreed, trying not to let her agitation show. There was red not- smoke boiling into the sky ahead; she had no time for her own fear, let alone the unboy’s.

  “Did they drown, or does it just look that way? Did the streets sink? Great Scott, it’s spooky down there.” He peered past the floating dead to see the sunken city below. “Those shadows, those are buildings, right? They aren’t . . . they don’t move, do they? That’s just the light, please tell me that’s just the light?”

  “It’s just the light.” Sesstri’s voice came out flat; she wouldn’t have believed herself. “Look at something elevated, if you’re frightened. Pick out a specific building, a wave or mountaintop, and fix your eyes on that point.” Maybe Bonseki-sai looked like an elaborate theater set piece for a reason. The abstracted construction was silly and impractical and potentially hazardous, but it did keep the eye from gazing too long into the abyss below.

  “I’m not scared.” Nixon sounded uncertain. “It only lasts a few minutes, anyway. Right?”

  As if on cue, the billowing red smoke spun itself into streamers of what looked like solid pigment, pennants of pure red color that rippled in a nonexis tent breeze, waving them forward. Red snaked through the branches of the huge succulent that rose from the center of the district.

  “The gray man was right to go on his own hunt, I think.” Nixon marveled as they followed streets that spiraled toward the tree, toward the billowing red strangeness. “Where are you taking me?”

  “Nowhere, stupid unboy. You followed me of your own accord.”

  “Yeah, but . . . yeah.”

  Bloated faces watched their footsteps as they wound their way to the middle of the neighborhood, colorless bodies floating with hair and limbs stretched out limply in the manner of drowned things; a sea, a deluge, a disaster frozen forever underfoot. Sesstri and Nixon kept their eyes fixed straight ahead. They’d almost reached the steps that led, at last, up from the solidified lake of the dead into the branches of the succulents, when a black shadow dropped from a low-hanging eave shaped like a row of cresting waves; the shadow shook a mop of white-blond hair and brandished a steel pipe. Nixon made a noise like chewing glass and dived for safety beneath a stone bench disguised as a puff of cloud.

  A member of the Undertow stood there, hate staining his face; he snarled, and gripped a length of steel pipe. Sesstri spat and called out a challenge to the lone Death Boy. “Twice in two days is twice too often for me to encounter your ilk, lich-lover.”

  The Death Boy bared his broken teeth and lunged, swinging his weapon at Sesstri’s head. Sesstri simply folded her body out of harm’s way, noticing as she bent backward to dodge the blow and retrieve a dagger from her leggings that she could almost make out the tattoo on the thug’s lip.

  “Where have you taken my associate, and why?” Sesstri demanded as she kicked the man in the kneecap. The blond thug spun away with a howl of pain and brought his heavy steel to bear, readying himself to lunge again at his opponent. The men who attacked them had not been Undertow, but Sesstri felt certain that this ambush was no mere coincidence.

  She flipped a dagger in the air, caught it by the blade, and sent it flying quick as a bird into the Death Boy’s forearm. The man dropped his pipe with another shriek, a dagger buried in the meat of his wrist.

  “Give me answers, or I’ll give you more knives. I have plenty.”

  “You’re full of flash,” hissed the Death Boy, wincing as he yanked Sesstri’s dagger from his arm, “but you’ll eat the crow of the living before the week is through. You’ll see your friend again, you pretty pink bitch, when he feeds your soul to the skylords. He’ll be a lich-lover now, and there’s nary a thing you can do to stop it.”

  Sesstri grabbed the crazed youth by the collar of his vest and punched his face twice in quick succession. Clutching his bloodied nose, the Death Boy stumbled backward and tumbled over a painted railing into a knot of jade plants.

  Frenzied, Sesstri kicked at the railing until a plank of wood came loose. She wrenched it free and leapt over the supine Death Boy, who was still coughing out blood he’d inhaled through his broken nose; Sesstri shoved the splintered end of the plank into the youth’s throat, pinning him to the ground. The empty-eyed dead grinned beneath them, flanking the fallen thug like ladies-in-waiting; waiting for him to join them.

  The cornered punk grabbed the plank with both hands and glared defiantly at Sesstri, whose hair fanned out in the sunrise as she panted from exertion. She looked like a pink- stained spider queen at the center of her web, and didn’t hesitate to throw her weight onto the broken plank until her attacker’s face turned purple and blood seeped from the splinters piercing his neck.

  “Listen to me very closely, trash,” Sesstri hissed, twisting the plank until the man squealed. “When I have been twice attacked in as many days, I abandon the willingness to curb my violent impulses. I do not know why you’re following me or why you have the poor sense to challenge me on your own, but I was raised by a warlord who taught me to kill before I learned to speak: the next time I see your face I will scrape it off your skull with my bootheel. Do you understand me, you miserable waste of meat?”

  The boy thrust his chin with defiance at Sesstri, digging the splinters deeper into his throat and proving that he was willing to die, though neither Sesstri nor Nixon knew exactly what death might mean for one held in thrall to the power of the undead.

  “I understand perfectly, whore of the pale vagrant. You fight for your lord and I fight for mine.”

  “Tut-tut.” Nixon had recovered the steel pipe and had planted his feet on either side of the Death Boy’s atomic-blond hair. “That’s not how we speak to ladies, you zombie-fucked beatnik.”

  Swinging with all of his tiny might, Nixon brought the weight of his stolen weapon down upon the thug’s head. Despite his diminutive size, the blow succeeded in spectacular fashion: bits of blood and skull showered Nixon’s face as well as the soft leather of Sesstri’s boots. The Death Boy lay still.

  Sesstri shot Nixon a disapproving look. “I had planned on extracting answers.”

  Nixon ducked his head. “Sorry, I wanted to prove that I—”

  The dead youth interrupted him with a gasp. He spasmed once, twice, and then sat up with a dumbfounded expression on what remai
ned of his face, even though by all rights he should be lifeless, lobotomized at the very best. But rather than the usual enfeeblements, death seemed to have quickened the boy: fast as a startled rat, he spun onto all fours, tearing clumps of hair out of his scalp that were trapped beneath Nixon’s feet, and scrambled away into the underbrush. Sesstri watched him go with an evaluating look.

  She tucked her remaining daggers back into their sheathes, combed her fingers through her morning-rose hair, and turned toward the branches of the tree at the center of Bonseki-sai. She set off toward it without another word.

  Nixon gathered her fallen things and ran after Sesstri, his stricken expression lingering until he remembered to replace it with a sideways smirk.

  “Monkey’s uncle, bird, you fight like the sauced Irish!”

  Sesstri maintained her pace and didn’t look back. “I don’t know what those words mean, but the thug received the thrashing he earned when he decided to attack me.”

  “I’ll say. You won’t get any argument from Nixon on that count; I believe in the battle, although I am a racist. I can do that with impunity now, because I left the fags and the chinks and the fucking Italians behind me. Well, the Italians at least. That’s gotta count for something.”

  “You’re a strange child, even owning the fact that you aren’t one. Is the Etellyuns so bad?”

  Nixon handed Sesstri a fallen dagger, hilt first. “They’re a goddamned nightmare, that’s what they are.”

  Safely away from the scene of the attack, Sesstri allowed herself to stop and gather her thoughts; she closed her eyes and tried to sublime her tension through a deep breath. Nixon watched her face, rapt. With her eyes closed and her plum-colored lips parted, he could almost imagine her as a soft, gentle thing, who gave soft, gentle kisses and would open her legs for him, just slightly, enough for him to feel her essential heat with the backs of his knuckles. . . .

  “Well, they may not be the woeful Etellyuns”—Sesstri shook off her reverie—“but if the Undertow are attacking me, and tracking us, then I am concerned, and I will remain so until I learn why.”