The Waking Engine

by David Edison

  “I’m not done. There’s something else, isn’t there? Something your average shaman might not understand. What is it? Why won’t you tell me?”

  More of her face emerged from the ribbon of red, like the head of a red silk snake. Kind eyes, but her bow mouth was set in a line. Cooper saw resignation and distaste and compassion.

  “Neat trick. I’m not asleep this time, I know that. I’m there and here. I’m standing in a cave alone and standing here in the cathedral-forest with the outline of your face and your empty body. So there’s that. But I am wide awake.”

  The sliver of the thing called Chesmarul that Cooper could perceive with his mind nodded. “True statement.” Then it pushed him down, and he fell through the golden ground into a shadow bigger than the sun. Below, he felt the city rushing up to meet him.

  Purity hefted the hammer. She wrapped both hands around its cord- wound handle and felt its weight. Colors from the Dawn Stains painted her face with a woad of light. She stepped closer to the nearest glass panel and raised the heavy instrument over her head. Then she froze. “What are you waiting for?” NoNo asked, rattling her sword in its parasol sheath.

  Purity didn’t rightly know how to answer that question, even to herself, but something held her back. Kaien and NoNo had both had ample opportunity to destroy the Dawn Stains before, and both had failed to do so. What made Purity the one everyone turned to for cultural terrorism?

  Oh my dead gods what am I doing? Purity went into a kind of seizure of awareness, straining every muscle in her body but not moving a hair. This is the closest thing we have to real holiness, don’t you see that? The Dawn Stains are our saints, our relics, our, our—heritage—you can’t expect me to destroy history. . . .

  Gravity sang a different song to her arms and the hammer trembling over her head.

  But that was just it, wasn’t it? Gravity. The gravity of history, the gravity of the rules that bound them: Kaien’s instructions from his father rested the future of the guilds and possibly the entire city upon his broad shoulders; NoNo’s deranged crimes originated with a blind instinct to protect her own; and had Prince Fflaen stood here himself, Purity was sure he would enumerate the reasons why the Weapon could not be allowed to fall into the mouth of even a single errant songbird.

  So the deed and its gravity fell to Purity. She wouldn’t shrink from it— she did agree with them all, though she doubted her own motives as much as anyone else’s. She’d been ready to destroy the Dawn Stains out of nothing more than frustration, pure and simple. But this time she had come prepared— and she would use the rules to break the game. She would leverage history for a different future.

  NoNo made an squawking noise. “I asked you a question, wench.” She rubbed her nose.

  Purity looked her friend in the eye and flexed her stiffening joints. She brought the hammer down and the room exploded with a color spray.

  One of seven stains shattered like a wave of gemstones: garnet, rose quartz, topaz, peridot. Petal, too, and bone and midnight, hanging in the air as the hammer slipped from Purity’s grip. The fall took forever; she fell to her knees just as slowly, crashing down with the glass.

  She had to stand up and smash the other panes, but Purity took her time, picking glass from her bleeding knees while studying the song encoded on the bottom of each pane. She kept darting her eyes toward the musical notation, committing the pattern to memory. Such a good memory for facts and dates and pages she’d read only once, and such a poor memory for names and faces. Purity blasphemed and prayed that her mind would not fail her.

  NoNo had flinched, but now she nodded toward the other stains, and Purity didn’t object. She hefted the hammer and obliterated another ancient glass window. And another, and another, all the while studying the pattern at the bottom bevel of each pane, and the Weapon hidden there. When she came to the last, a wafer of ancient glass suspended from wire and steel, Purity hesitated. A woman with red drops on her side placed an ugly black crown on her own head. This Stain was the oldest, its picture the most ruined, and age had transformed the crown into a mad thing that ate the head of the woman king.

  With a stab of guilt, Purity tore her gaze from the figure in the glass and took a final glance at the blurred bars of black and gold underneath, searing the image onto her brain like a brand. Then she swung the hammer up, underhand, and watched the spray fly across the room. A lesson from eternity, shattered.

  “There’s a good girl. You’ve lived up to your name today, lass.”

  Lass? Purity dropped the wretched hammer and marveled at NoNo, a fraction of a powerful personality. She keeps on quoting pirates, because it’s all she knows.

  “You, boy.” NoNo poked Kaien with her sword, cutting through his arm like butter. He cried out and she giggled. “Run.”

  “I’m afraid I can’t do that, Miss Leibowitz.”

  “Do you want to die, or Die? Run or choose, boy.”

  “Kaien.” Purity nodded. “Please go. Please.” She didn’t know what would happen if he stayed.

  Go, Purity mouthed. Kaien pulled himself up the spiral staircase warily, though she knew he wouldn’t go very far. Let NoNo have her laugh, Purity had something far more exciting, something she’d been starved of for far too long: leverage.

  Purity stepped her way across the shards of half a million years, toward the stairs. NoNo Leibowitz watched her bloodied friend approach with glee. And the ghost of a macaw on her shoulder. Suddenly a champagne cork of hysterical, inappropriate giggles exploded somewhere inside Purity, and she blinked hard through tears not to laugh out loud.

  So she sang instead. She felt her voice echo off the billionstone walls around her—the air still rang with the force of her blows. Purity could wield the song as the Weapon; it hung in the air, a shattered bell- song reverberating with released and dissipating power—at least, she hoped it was dissipating, or she’d have committed treasonous vandalism for naught.

  As she sang, Purity closed her eyes and visualized the black and gold bars, hovering in her short-term memory. Then she relaxed into her breeding. If she had been raised for anything it was this: light music at a luncheon, a turn at the pianoforte, or a song to accompany a harpist at a pre- engagement luncheon preparatory party. It’s just that today’s excursion was Deadly. Purity was no songbird and had only NiNi’s annoying humming as reference for the notation on the Dawn Stains, but she managed with the pitchy determination of a daughter of privilege. The warble threading out of her throat grew into a melody, and NoNo’s eyes grew wide.

  “Don’t! Purity, we’re on the same siiiii . . .”

  The Weapon worked. Even as NoNo protested, her voice thickened like honey and her hands waved less wildly, an incredibly intricate clockwork toy grinding to a Dead stop. NoNo’s face froze in paralyzed panic, and Purity couldn’t turn away from the sight—as with the hammer and the Dawn Stains, she felt compelled to finish her work.

  The song was not long, but it ended where it began, looping neatly— so Purity sang it again, then again, marching the key through the sequence of an arpeggio almost automatically. So much for music lessons being worthless, she thought as NoNo’s Dying body began to lose color, then opacity. Purity kept singing, flinging out high, sharp notes at NoNo like daggers.

  I hate you. Purity poured her soul into the song, remembering NoNo’s promise to destroy Baron Kloo next. We were bad enough before this, cutting up girls for fashion infractions. Now we’re all monsters. Now I’m a Murderer, too. NoNo said she’d wanted to keep her mother’s hands clean, but she’d fouled them all instead.

  NoNo’s eyes disappeared completely, then the rest of her. She simply evaporated, the ghost of her body boiled away. Purity stopped singing mid-tune, dumbfounded by the sudden finality of the act—like a clock breaking. She stood alone amidst the ruins of the Dawn Stains, white stone walls glowing softly on her Murdering face.

  12

  Life is a regrettable affair. It demoralizes and defeats me and I wish it never to end.


  —Winston Churchill, Jenny In Space

  The shadow of the being called Chesmarul enveloped Cooper like the sea swallowing a sinking ship. He felt like wind and starlight in an airless non-place that could never feel a breeze or a single stray photon. The city that rushed up to meet him was a distant dot in the jeweled abyss below, just a glint in the pinwheel of light that Cooper recognized was the worlds—themetaverse.

  The worlds spun like a mobile, suspended from an invisible point above and anchored from below by the lick of space that was the City Unspoken. Between the unseen apex and the urban nadir shivered a span of creations, light whirling about light in an endless braided dance.

  Among the lights of creation, Cooper saw teeming trillions—the syncopated fireflies that were mortal lives and, much fewer, the emeralds hidden among costume jewelry that were the slow-burning gemmed hearts of the First People. The fireflies and their elder counterparts swirled across the worlds in a turbulence that seemed random yet somehow guided; coordinated, at least, if not ordered. The hearts of the living were engines of life, and they woke and woke and woke, radiating loneliness and hope.

  But something felt wrong. Some lights burned too brightly and seemed agitated, others pulsed irregularly, fading to the point of vanishing before strobing back to life. As he spiraled toward the city, Cooper sensed a foulness that offended the senses—a stopped-up drain, a sink gone foul. Sewage and offal and . . . sludge, invisible sludge clogging the lambent arteries of the living worlds.

  No sooner did the bubble of that thought pop inside his head than Cooper was falling into the lights, not a pinwheel now but a rushing smear of cosmos growing larger and larger as he fell headfirst, the interstitial ether glowing around his shoulders like the shroud of superheated gas surrounding a rocket during reentry. The distant dot of the city grew until he saw the streets and parks spread out beneath him—and beneath the streets, the inverted skyscrapers where the Winnowed made their stalactite-homes, and beneath those, in fact directly beneath the gleaming Dome, a sphere of black and gold metal that pulsed with electricity and . . . music. He had no time to try and veer himself toward the buried machine before he tumbled in the direction of an H-shaped building and fell faster, faster, toward a green mansard roof and greener grass encircled by a high wall.

  Trees shaded the mansion from view, but Cooper noted a familiar black-lacquered carriage with red-trimmed wheels. Lallowë Thyu. He had no time to curse before he shot through the copper and timber of the roof. Floors and rooms flapped through him like the pages of a flip-book, and then he hit something hard that knocked the wind from his chest.

  Blinking his eyes, Cooper lifted his head, relieved that his body seemed intact; he found himself lying on the ground in a space too similar to the golden cathedral-forest to be accidental. Similar, but opposite. Gray instead of gold- green; bone rather than bark; built and not grown. Pillars of bone rose in the place of trees, but at the same angles, if on a smaller scale. Conical vaults made of—skulls?—rose above his head in imitation of the golden boughs, and little enchanted lights hung at their apexes, burning inside tiny round cages. Rib cages. Babies’ rib cages.

  Fucking delightful.

  “What in the name of the King Beneath the Hill are you?” a voice asked. “And how did you find your way down here?”

  Cooper tried to climb to his feet but lost his balance when he saw that the floor he pushed himself up from was made of finger bones. He let out a cry of disgust and scrambled to regain his purchase.

  Across from him stood a lovely man dressed in a green coat over black livery, with hair like a fox that fell over his eyes. The man’s ripe lips were rubbed with just a dab of pink petal dust. He held a femur bone in one hand and a bucket of bitumen in the other.

  “Don’t panic.” Cooper held out his hands, realizing he was still wearing no more than a plaid workshirt and a makeshift sarong. “I’m here on official business.”

  “You’re the gray man’s human!” the valet exclaimed, pointing. “Yeah?” Cooper cleared his throat and straightened his back. “You must be the mean lady’s butler.”

  Tam narrowed his eyes. “I am not a butler.” Then hefted the bone in his hand and lunged at Cooper, swinging for his head. Cooper blocked with his forearm and punched Tam in his exposed armpit. It was an awkward but lucky blow—Why didn’t I take those self-defense classes? Cooper asked himself as his fist connected—he’d struck the sensitive bundle of nerve ganglia hidden under the armpit, and Tam’s arm went momentarily dead.

  “Mab, that hurts!” Tam cursed when he’d blinked away tears, cradling his numb arm and the mass of pain beneath his shoulder. The two men looked at each other and reached a wordless accord that they were neither of them fighters.

  “Look, I just don’t want to be fucked with, okay?” Cooper bargained for parley, as if spontaneously manifesting in an enemy’s bone cellar weren’t something to get jumpy about.

  “You stupid boy, how was I ever as green as you?” Tam sounded exhausted. “I haven’t any power to fuck with you or leave you unfucked-with, but I can tell you this: why ever you’re here, you’ve saved my mistress another kidnapping. Now put your hands down and leave me be.” Tam flicked his eyes toward Cooper’s crotch. “Or the marchioness will find a different member to sever.”

  Cooper said nothing, until Tam tossed his head and said, “Fine. Can I get you some coffee?”

  Upstairs, for lack of a better idea, Tam marched Cooper into the kitchens, where he sat on a stool, sulking. He looked around the large white- tiled room lined with steel sinks the size of bathtubs and an army of oven and stovetop ranges; a pile of china on the counter beside him bore the red-and- black coat of arms of Oxnard Terenz-de-Guises. Although his back was no longer a mantle of pain, he nevertheless resented Alouette for dumping him here. Whatever she was—Cooper had felt the touch of her true self thrice now, he thought, and no longer accepted her protestations quite so glibly. He cursed her silently. Lady, goddess, sea mammal— any way, I hate you.

  Tam poured coffee, pained by the responsibility of keeping Cooper contained until his mistress returned. Cooper seemed to have little- to-no appreciation for the horrors awaiting him when Lallowë discovered him, which made Tam suspicious and tremendously uncomfortable. And a little bored, said the part of him that had been amidst faeries for too long.

  “I must say, you’re making me tremendously uncomfortable,” Tam told Cooper. “. . . And a little bored.”

  Cooper just nodded. Tam wrung his hands. Cooper closed his eyes and listened.

  LaLaLaDon’tRun, HmmHmmStayPleaseStay OhOhOhIHateItHereHmm. Tam’s thoughts, even his fears, were strangely musical, not quite unhinged but definitely tainted with what Cooper could only guess was faeriestuff. A hundred years of singing flown by in a single night, that sort of thing; Tam reeked of it.

  It still felt odd to hear fear and see identity. Since recovering from his torture atop the towers and the dawning awareness of the cumulative effects of his recent deliria, dreams, and hallucinations, Cooper’s abilities seemed not only stronger but also linked to a vaster body of intuition than he could possibly merit: looking at Tam, he could see a pale blue note above a bowl- shaped guitar, a sign that fluttered over the majordomo’s throat. A rather delicious throat, as well as the rest of him, Cooper couldn’t help but notice—if a little over-painted. Tam’s forearms—he’d rolled his shirtsleeves to wash dishes—were more muscled than his thin frame suggested, and his lower body filled out his trousers admirably, especially tight around the thighs and rear.

  “How does she keep you here?” Cooper asked the fox-haired domo.

  “Pardon?” Tam tossed his head and pretended not to have heard.

  “Lallowë Thyu. You’re her slave, right?”

  This appalled Tam. “Certainly not! I am no slave.” Then, reluctantly: “I just can’t ever leave, and must obey at all times.”

  Cooper swirled his dregs. “I thought I was conflicted. Are you fucking her?”


  “Not lately.” Tam smiled, suddenly chummy, then darted back into formation, quick as a minnow. “No, I’m being saucy—Lallowë Thyu inherited me. I’ve been passed down from one fickle fey to another like an heirloom that cleans house. I haven’t been pleasurable to the marchioness’ family for a thousand years or more, although the reason I was originally . . . acquired . . . was, ostensibly, for my pleasing looks as much as my skill with the lute.” The golden note and bowl- shaped string instrument glowed brighter as he spoke.

  That sign is who he is. Cooper reminded himself. It’s his name. “What is a lute, anyway? It’s the sort of thing I’m always hearing referenced in period films and fantasy stories, but I don’t think I’ve ever actually heard any, um, lutations? Does it sound like the guitar? God, this coffee is good.”

  “It’s a funny little guitar that sounds, to me, like home. Why don’t I fetch you some cheeses? I think you’ve had enough coffee.”

  “Are you kidding me, faeriefucker? Do you know how long it’s been since I had a cuppa joe?” Cooper moaned in a caffeinated glow. Tam just stood there, not understanding Cooper on principle. “Nevermind, I don’t know why I bother with you people. Might as well try to pull the donkey’s head off Nick Bottom.”

  “You know Nick?” Tam lit up.

  Is this guy for real? “I know his work, sure. Top me off, Tam-tam.” Tam dispensed a miserly amount of coffee from the pot and shook his head, apparently sincere and not a little distraught. “Poor Asshat Nick. Seelie bastards ate his mind. They say they’re the good ones but, really, if you want to know the absolute truth—”

  “—And you know I do, Tamela—” Cooper drained the demitasse with gusto and slapped it onto the countertop. Bardic references aside, he had no idea what Tam was talking about. So far, that seemed about par for Cooper’s insane course. I should not feel this good, he thought, before dismissing the idea as a letdown.