The Waking Engine

by David Edison

  Purity put her head in her hands. Getting the truth out was always an uphill battle, wasn’t it? Did making things right ever get easier?

  “Essa, you’re right. Absolutely right. All I did was Kill a friend and smash some windows. And if you stop fussing and sniffling, I’ll tell you why that changes everything.”

  “Well . . . alright, ma’am. If you say so.”

  Essa literally sat on her hands as Purity began recounting her recent escapades, beginning with the butchering of Rawella Eightsguard. The girl’s eyes grew wider as she listened, and by the time Purity reached her showdown with NoNo and the destruction of the Dawn Stains, she thought Essa’s eyelids might simply atrophy and disappear entirely.

  “Them Circle lords could go around Killing anyone they wanted to the whole time?” Essa asked, doubly amazed when Purity explained how many hundreds of de cades the Circle Unsung had maintained their True Death détente.

  “And your friend was Killing us just for practice.” That came out softer, Essa’s voice tinged with what Purity prayed was the first blush of outrage—or at least awareness of the world around her. The girl would spread the truth, Purity felt sure of it.

  “And now you’ve smashed them windows, they can’t Kill no more.”

  “The song lived in the glass. Our throats could borrow it, but now that the Stains are gone, it’s just music. So yes, the power that anchored the Circle is gone, Essa.”

  Purity was technically lying to the girl, since she had no notion about what would happen now and who knew how the Weapon functioned, let alone the nature of its connection to the stains— but Purity believed what she said; now that she’d had time to think about the Dawn Stains and the Weapon—the song— she’d reached several conclusions. Purity felt confident that history would prove her correct: the Dawn Stains heralded from the age of the aesr, who were a species of First People. What fragments of history from that era that had survived strongly associated the aesr with light and music—was it such a stretch, then, to hypothesize that they had preserved their gift in the Dawn Stains for their successors? Like an insect in amber, the aesr’s talent had persevered through aeons, known only to the Circle Unsung and the prince.

  Essa shook her head. She might not have benefitted from the same education and life of enrichment as Purity, but the girl possessed her own body of knowledge. “Begging your pardon, Lady Miss, but how will that change anything, if the nobles still own everything? It isn’t escaping Murder we work all our lives for, is it now? It’s nickeldimes to feed the family, and clothe ’em. And if that’s any different today than it was yesterday, ma’am, I don’t see how.”

  Purity puffed herself up for a lecture about the primacy of power structure, and how a destabilization at the top of a food chain, even if it seemed unrelated, would mean incrementally larger disruptions for the status quo of each descending tier. “The hierarchy that was secured by the threat of mutually assured destruction will begin to decay, you see, and—”

  Then a piece of the wall pushed itself onto the floor with a crash that startled both women. Essa would have screamed, but Purity pinched the skin of her thigh hard, and the cleaning girl bit her lip and managed only a frantic whimper. On the other side of the cell a hexagonal hole appeared where the block had been dislodged, and as the girls stared, the dustsmeared face of Kaien Rosa emerged.

  “Come on,” he said, and cocked his head only to knock it against the block above. “Ouch. I can’t get my shoulders through, but you should be able to slip out. Hurry up before someone comes to find out why the walls are falling apart.”

  Almondine met her sister without emotion. Lallowë did not return the favor.

  What she did was screech in fury. A glass- shattering, earsplitting screech that lasted over a minute. Downstairs, Tam clapped his hands over his ears and Cooper would have done the same, except he was too busy hiding under the kitchen table. Lallowë sat in her bath, her nearly complete matrix gleaming inside the shell, immersed in the only two comforts she had in this filthy city— and in one sweep of the door, all of her security had been shattered. All of her plans. Hopes.

  She screeched in fury and disbelief and hate and loneliness and defiance and in a wretchedly sincere relief to have her sister returned to her. She screeched at her mother, who surely orchestrated this last-minute betrayal, at Almondine for daring to go away and daring to return, and—mostly— at herself for not anticipating this twist, and for the weakness inside herself that made her glad to see her sister. Later, when she could, Lallowë would excoriate her father for passing on to her that human weakness; now, she would continue to point a turquoise claw at Almondine and scream.

  Almondine simply stood there, expressionless. She wore a hound’s-tooth pea coat, grey and black, and a pale blue dress that belonged on a young girl. No longer made of wood, her face pink and perfect, Almondine stared at her sister as if trying to remember Lallowë’s name. Her hair curled at the nape of her neck in a bob—the same hue and luster as when she was made of cherrywood, but her eyes were empty. Perhaps they’d always been that way.

  Lallowë reached to the side of the wide shale pool and snatched up her reengineered, reprogrammed vivisistor. It looked inconspicuous inside its pocket watch shell, but it represented the accumulation of years of positioning, conniving, hours of wasted talking, and marriage. She shook the living bauble at her sister and forced herself to find words.

  “ Why? Why did I do all of this work for you to just wake up like nothing happened? Do you have any idea what I’ve put myself through?” She stood, naked, water and bubbles pouring off her naked breasts.

  “Sister, I’m glad to see you again too.” Almondine ran her finger along the polished edge of the door frame. “What. A happy. Reunion.”

  “Mother brought you back, she must have done. What did I do to earn this?” Lallowë wrapped herself in a terry cloth robe and shook her hair to dry it in an instant.

  “You can ask her when she arrives.” Almondine primped her own bob with one hand. “Although if I were a betting elf, I’d put my money on simple ill will.”

  “Mother is coming here?” Lallowë screeched again. Then, calmly, “Of course she is.”

  “I understand you’ve been researching the vivisistors that enable Mother’s transformation. What is she about?” Almondine’s blue eyes didn’t seem to blink at all.

  “How do you know that? You’ve been wood.” She started to walk past Almondine, but took the other door instead, that led to her dressing rooms.

  “Even wood dreams. You should have some idea of what she’s after.”

  “Yes, well maybe I should, Almsy. And you’ve been dead for years, you should have stayed that way.” Lallowë turned to her vanity so that Almondine could not see, and reached out for a box of smooth red metal—but she stopped short of touching it. Not yet. Instead she dropped her robe and drew a chocolate wool bolero across her shoulders, fingering the brocade for comfort.

  Almondine padded toward her sister with a look of probational sympathy.

  “I understand your animosity, Lolly, and always have. I kept quiet for years to give you a chance to prove yourself, and you did. But Mother . . . Mother changed the game, and I don’t honestly think that there can be any more competing for her favor. We are both just meat to her now; she sees all organics as incomplete.”

  “Is that your way of declaring war, then?” Lallowë admired herself in the mirror, naked save for the little jacket, which obscured her breasts but did not hide them.

  Almondine shook her head. “Not against you, Lolly. Stop choosing outfits and listen, please:

  “While I slept, I dreamt of the one who stole my soul. It was not one of the First People, Lallowë. It was Mother.” Almondine cocked her head, eyes still as dead as dormice. “The fey are terrified of her. She forces mutilations upon them, steals the legs of little faerie girls, fills their bodies with vivisistors, which are connected to each other, all of them, irreversibly.”

  Lallowë lau
ghed to herself, wishing she had an army or a cold glass of wine standing between herself and her sister. “You may have dreamed all that, sister, but I lived it. I saw her take her lover, some favored champion of the Wild Hunt, and tear off his feet. Now he lopes through a wasteland on recurved tension blades and weeps with each step; his mutilations might even matter, if there were anything left to kill in her game reserves.” The vivisistors are networked?

  Her sister nodded once; her eyes were glass.

  “One other thing.” Almondine hesitated, deciding whether or not to continue. “I dreamt one other thing—I dreamt the memory of our sister. I dreamt she was close to you, Lolly.”

  “Our sister?” Lallowë stopped cold, the hangers of slacks in her hands forgotten.

  “Don’t you remember? When we were small there was a holiday, and our sister came to play. She thought she was dreaming, of course, but still she visited us in the way that human children so often do: accidentally, and in dreams or at twilight, dawn, some liminal hour. And Mother gave us dresses she’d had the spiderkin weave, and we played rabbit-rabbit- worg. You were the worg the whole time, chasing us all through the brush and howling like a mad thing. Then Mother gave us iced cakes and sweet wine and danced for us, I remember. She called us Almsy and Lolly and Sissy.”

  Sissy. Lallowë narrowed her eyes and crossed her arms.

  “I remember no such thing.” She was not pleased to hear talk of another sister—this morning she had been an only child, now she was bookended by bitches from the same litter. Shoved aside by her mother— again—and kept out of the loop entirely, it would seem. “I do not remember any Sissy.”

  “Well, I do.” Almondine fingered some spare clockworks that Lallowë had left on a dresser. “She was a sharp little thing, angry like you but without your cruelty. Hair like sunrise, thanks to fey blood, but her hands were human, so she couldn’t stay—her blood ran to baseline human. You shouldn’t concern yourself with her, Lolly, she’s not a contender. Just a memory. We both need to keep our eyes on Mother; I don’t know what she intends but there is a chance it will . . . conflict . . . with . . .”

  “With life as we know it?”

  Almondine flashed a blade-thin smile that could have been Lallowë’s. “As you know it, maybe. I haven’t known life for some time.”

  “Yet here you are, returned to take my place.” Lallowë took off her bolero, then put it back on, uncertain how she should react.

  “Your place? Lolly, no.” Almondine leaned against a dresser and inspected her nails—they’d always been strong, sharp wood. Living wood.

  “You honestly, truly expect me to believe that Mother didn’t revive you to supplant me?” Lallowë settled on a ruched wrap jacket with deep inner pockets, and with the discarded bolero in one hand she surreptitiously grabbed the red metal jewel box. The Ruby Naught had once belonged to her husband’s grandfather, but now it was hers, all hers. And it could do far more than sever fingers.

  Almondine frowned. “I don’t know what Mother intends, honestly. She speaks in riddles these days, even when she means to be straightforward. She has compromised the integrity of her essential self, and I could no sooner follow her logic than I could follow her orders.”

  “You expect me to believe that you’re here to disobey?” Lallowë scoffed. “Perfect little Almondine?”

  “I am my mother’s daughter. I will never betray her, Lallowë, do not think that.” The elder sister put her palms together and cracked her knuckles. She spoke deliberately so that Lallowë could not willfully misunderstand. “I have always accepted as fact my succession. I will rule, I thought. Let you rant—there was no amount of success you could achieve that would displace me: by primacy and by blood, I am Mother’s heir. Only . . . I do not want to rule a broken empire. Do you?”

  Lallowë lowered her eyes. “The Court of Scars could be restored, if Mother were to be removed.”

  Almondine nodded. “Just so.”

  “And it might be even worse, Almondine, than just ruling broken universes. You say you’ve seen what Mother did to our people—machine faeries coughing up engine oil.” Lallowë arched her back and felt her body, whole and young and flawless. “Have you ever considered what atrocities she would force upon her heir?”

  “What else were you about with your vivisistor, if not atrocity?” Almondine asked. “Mother could have done as much to me as I slept, or she could have let you finish your treachery and make me into an abomination. But she did not, and for that she will forever have my gratitude. I cried in relief when I awoke down below, in your ossuary, Lolly. Not to be awake—what is life, and what is waking?—but to be whole.”

  The Cicatrix unleashed the madness when she felt the chains wake, juddering to life after millennia of slumber. That was an interesting development—one her assays had assigned a likelihood of less than 5 percent—but would not significantly disrupt her own. She held no truck with the First People; the signs of Chesmarul’s interference weren’t hard to miss, certainly, but the queen hadn’t known to what extent the being’s interests would collide with her own—or if Chesmarul would make a play to help the mortals avoid the plague of deathless madness that would momentarily consume them.

  Why Chesmarul would put the chains into play escaped the Cicatrix’s reasoning, but it changed little: operational or deactivate, that machine— that ancient, impossible engine—would yield up its secrets once she stormed the Dome and handed the city to her allies.

  The First People were immortal, not omnipotent. Soon enough, they would share even their immortality. Freedom; scars like lacework crisscrossed her tongue, but the Cicatrix could still taste it.

  So much effort spent looking for evidence of the svarning, only to discover that it had been growing within her all the while. It was the song she could not stop the vivisistors from singing to one another—the network she could not disable—and she’d fed it with her own life force. It was not at all unlike a child.

  Perhaps the fourth would make her proud.

  “Unspool, you childe of faerie.” She crooned to the svarning, opening up her systems to vent the madness into the space between worlds. “The ancients named you, but I give you life.”

  It rushed out of her like bad blood, clotted and knotty, swarming the air. It gobbled up spare thoughts, demanding attention, a magical neurosis that never slept. Soon it would drown the metaverse for its mother— a gift she would humbly accept.

  Asher stood at the crown of the caldera and surveyed the city he’d striven for so long to protect. The mountain that contained the Apostery offered the best view of the city: Caparisonside and the Lindenstrasse still slept quietly in the predawn light, except where plumes of smoke and dust rose from streets and intersections collapsed by the movement of the massive catenary chains as they returned to their ancient positions and began their intended function. Due west, the Guiselaine bustled as always, torches and gas lamps illuminating its maze of streets. Displacement Avenue shot northeast out from the Guiselaine like a needle of light, more alive at night than during the day.

  To the northwest the false elements of Bonseki-sai boiled in eternal struggle and balance, or at least they seemed to. North of that, Godsmiths slumbered as well as it ever did, which was fitfully at best. To the far north, towers burnt beneath a swarm of black clouds. Even in the predawn light, Asher could see that the clouds that hovered over the abandoned towers now stretched a finger of black turbulence south, toward the Dome. The liches and their black dogs marched to war.

  The Apostery’s caldera offered more than a view: if the chains were moving, then all eyes would be on the Dome— aboveground. That was a spectacle that would captivate and terrify, and even the praetors would be too panicked to think of posting a rear guard. While the Undertow fought their madman’s battle, Asher would sneak inside unseen.

  That wasn’t all. He’d stood here twice before, so long ago that the precincts of that city had been erased and rebuilt, and erased and rebuilt again. History was a pal
impsest that would not remember your name, nor recall why it mattered. Or so Asher hoped: he could not remember his father’s name, but he remembered coming to the lip of this pit, a hundred thousand years ago or more, as a child. His father had been blinding, and when the world-beast blessed his reign, Asher had not known he could feel such pride. When the time came for Asher to stand in his father’s place, well, by then things had grown darker. The world-beast’s blessing had not felt so generous, then.

  Despite the incense smoke that rolled out of the Apostery, Asher could smell the life in his city—the polyps that punctuated his rib cage pulsed in time to the heartbeat of the city, maddening lately but more alive than ever, since he’d sang the Lady to her peace. He’d had to flex organs he hadn’t used in years to keep the spears of light from stabbing through his leathers and refixing his face. Sesstri would beat him senseless when she saw the truth.

  He smiled, feeling the ache that always arose when he thought of Sesstri but could not reach out a hand to feel her body, slender and firm, smelling always of parchment and leather.

  The Dome pulsed with urgency: the Dome, always the Dome. He avoided looking at it whenever he could, but now he had no choice. A spherical mountaintop larger by orders of magnitude than any other structural or topographical curiosity within the sprawling necropolis, the Dome glowed gold and green from within— a combination of the false sunlight illuminating the wooded glades within, the riotous vegetation itself, cloaking the buildings within from sight, and the thick tempered glass held in place by whorls and webs of metal.

  If the telltale seismic activity originated where Asher supposed it did, the unchanging monument would soon look differently: by the time the sun crested the horizon, the Dome would open like a five-petaled flower. He could feel the chains moving underneath the city, winding tight around ancient drums—from the Guiselaine, from the Lindenstrasse, Caparisonside, and Godsmiths, from the wasteland in the north where the Undertow hid amidst the bristling towers that no one living recalled was once called the Argent Theft.