The Waking Engine

by David Edison

  He could delay the moment no longer. Time to jump. Time to irradiate. Swallowing the pain of five years of self-exile, Asher spread his arms and leapt from the crown of the caldera; the smoke- stained scent of a thousand false faiths whipped past his head as he dropped like a stone through the cylindrical shaft. He aimed for a spot far below: the metal plate at the center of the Apostery courtyard. These days it was worn smooth, but once it had borne his father’s crest.

  His forebears had uncrowned themselves here, dashing their bodies on the floor far below. He’d last seen his father like this, rushing to greet his fate, painting the seal with white blood—singing the final song of his Death, and clearing the way for his heir. If the chains did not work as they ought, Asher would share a similar fate, pulped beyond recognition, leaving the city leaderless.

  He thought pulp might indeed be his immediate future, until the entire courtyard shuddered and rock dust blasted out from beneath the plate as he raced toward it; a fraction of a second before Asher would have crashed into the metal slab, it began to drop. As the plate accelerated downward like a dumbwaiter cut loose from its counterweight, Asher caught up to it and met its surface—touching down with his feet and one gray hand, a feather-soft landing. He smiled without warmth; a real prince would not try to survive. A real prince would abdicate and disappear.

  The second half of the ride happened just as quickly as the first: mirroring the vertical shaft that rose above the now-gaping hole in the center of the Apostery courtyard, so did a similar, deeper pit drop away beneath it; the metal crest descended steadily, guided by the catenary chain that must still be attached to its underside, and through this aboriginal bore Asher rode the ancient elevator to the bottom of the city he’d ruled and strangled and ruined, resigned at last to go home.

  Cooper was thrilled to hear Lolly’s screams, though judging by the ashen look on Tam’s face, the domo did not share Cooper’s enthusiasm; the foxfaced young man kept tugging at his vest as if a tidy outfit might protect him from the worst of the fallout. It likely won’t, poor guy.

  Tam had hurried Cooper into a high, long hallway, a groin-vaulted ceiling looking down upon a carpet runner the color of red velvet cake, its deep pile resting atop a blocky parquet that vanished in both directions, the whitewashed walls covered with a small infinity of tapestry. A nearby credenza overflowed with the same white flowers that had enshrined Lallowë during his amputation in the greenhouse, but these were severed at the stems and their petals no longer breathed.

  “Oh come on.” Cooper nudged Tam. “Did you forget how to smile?” Tam gave Cooper a strange look. “I remember smiling, Cooper, I just don’t remember why we did it. These days . . .” He trailed off, and for just a moment, Tam looked like his head felt too crowded with anxieties, as if he wanted to bash his brains out against the doorjamb.

  Cooper eyed the domo warily. Tam’s namesign spoiled like bad fruit before Cooper’s eyes—the bowl-shaped stringed instrument went from gold to brown, and the note above it disappeared entirely. Then, as if a cloud blocking the sun passed and let light flood back down onto the world, Tam’s namesign restored itself, and Tam was shaking his head as if to clear it. “I’m sorry. What just happened?”

  Cooper looked cagey. “Eh, Tam, I’m not so sure I should tell you. You’re kind of the enemy, you know.”

  Tam tossed his head and scrubbed his fingers through his hair, which fell to one side like a roan mane. “A single night beneath the faerie mound . . .” Tam said to the ceiling, noticing the cobwebs among the molding. He’d have to get out a stepladder. “I know what I am.” He squared his shoulders and seemed to have made a decision. “Let’s get you out of here, while we can.”

  Cooper thought to apologize for calling Tam the enemy, but just then the whole mansion shook, its floors and walls vibrating angrily—and he felt something pass underground with the force of a subway train.

  “What, now we have earthquakes?” he asked, but in his head he saw a spiderweb beneath the city, only the web was made of metal chains as thick as house. He saw a dragon made of black plastics with the face of a faerie. He saw the Dome at the center of the spiderweb, waiting.

  “Titania’s tits, how should I know?” Tam grumbled, and hurried Cooper to a heavy door at the end of a service corridor. Tam opened the door onto a short landing beside one of the Guiselaine’s many canals, and there they found a surprise: little Nixon stood in the doorway with his hands on his hips and an impatient expression.

  “We don’t give alms,” Tam said brusquely. “There’s a baker off Velocipede Way who sometimes takes in street children, if you’re willing to knead dough for your supper.” He made to slam the door.

  Cooper caught the door midswing. Nixon nodded gravely and held out his little hand. “Time to run, turd. Me and the pink broad are cooling our heels on a riverboat, but I think you better hurry.” Another tremor shook the house.

  Cooper looked toward Tam imploringly. “The ground is heaving. Your lady’s sister is back from the wooden. I’ve been severed and body-bound. The Dying can’t Die and there’s a . . . there’s a place I need to be.” Cooper paused, wincing at what he said next. “I’m such a dork. I’m such a waste . . . I know you from the stories, Young Tam Lin—do you even know you’re in stories? If I don’t go now, there won’t be any more stories, ever.” Tam pursed his lips and pointed to a rickety ladder leaning against the manse wall that could be tipped over the canal and used as a footbridge. The quay beyond forked off into an alleyway that disappeared into the Guiselaine, and would be the quickest route to flee.

  “Thank you.” Cooper stepped out into the morning light and looked back at the domo, with his fox-red hair and his green suit with the silk vest and neatly knotted tie—Tam’s hands were shaking on the doorframe, and he looked behind him into the house. He pulled a wistful face and shook his head. “Just leave while you can, Cooper.” Then he closed the door, its lock snapping into place and obviating further discussion. “Let’s go,” Cooper said to Nixon, lowering the poorly made ladder so that it bridged the canal. Nixon skipped across and waited for Cooper with a crooked smirk.

  The alleys of the Guiselaine weren’t busy, but the few people they passed wore expressions that were tight around the eyes and full of agita. A busker stood against a blond stone wall, drenched in morning light and looking at his guitar like it was filled with snakes. A flower girl carried her basket under one arm and smiled at them, but her flowers were dry and brown—she seemed too busy coughing up dark, wriggling things to notice. Two men who looked like brothers stood on opposite sides of a three- foot wok simmering with fragrant, popping oil; they fried flatbread and rolled it around fresh cut coldcumbre and onion, but never took their eyes from the boiling oil. Nixon swiped a pair of rolls as he walked by, but the brothers only stared at the oil, mesmerized.

  “Is Sesstri really waiting for us on a boat?” Cooper asked, taking the roll that Nixon proffered and scarfing it down. Nixon nodded, his mouth full of fried bread and vegetables.

  Nixon swallowed and wiped his hands on the apron of a grandmother who stood in her doorway, looking frantically in every direction but seemingly afraid to take a step. Her hands dripped liquid shit, pouring from her fingertips. Cooper and Nixon turned down a narrow lane crisscrossed with laundry lines.

  “I always wanted to live on a riverboat, you know,” Nixon said, tucking his thumbs through the belt loops of his short pants.

  “Really?” Cooper asked, incredulous.

  Nixon scrunched up his face. “Of course not, idiot. There’s only one thing I ever wanted to be.” The unboy cackled and leapt over a puddle. “A classmate once said he’d voted for me no fewer than twenty times, for one student office or another, before I graduated from school. I, friend, am very good at becoming what I want to be.” Nixon bit his lip. “. . . And a little less good at staying that way. Here we are.”

  A barge waited at the quay. A woman the shape of a box stood quiet at the helm, and an old man with long yell
ow- gray hair and a soup- stained beard waved a hand toward Cooper. Nixon hopped back and forth on each foot, impatient to be away. “This is Captain Bawl,” he said to Cooper, dipping his head at the square helmswoman, “she’s taking us to the middle of the action.”

  “Hello, hello, bluebird!” The old man waved almost girlishly, smiling a great big hello in Cooper’s direction. “You’re awake now.”

  “I am!” Cooper agreed. “Was I otherwise?” He stepped onto the barge, which pushed off immediately.

  “Don’t ask, Cooper.” Sesstri’s voice came from behind the captain. She sat cross-legged on a crate, reclining against the wooden shed that served as the barge’s cabin. She had a book in her lap and a brown cigarillo dangling from the corner of her mouth. “Don’t. Fucking. Ask.”

  The old man pulled at his yellow beard. “Weren’t we all, my son? Otherwise and unawake, all of us.”

  Nixon rolled his eyes and hopped up onto a cargo crate.

  The cube of woman at the helm grunted apologetically, steering them out of the Guiselaine’s narrow passages. “You’ve been aboard the Barge Brightly before, in a sack with a lump on your head.”

  “I have?” Cooper looked at her—she looked, well, tough was a word. “When?”

  Sesstri leaned forward to drop-kick one of her books off the side of the barge. “I warned you,” she said before returning to her reading; her poise looked effortless, even on what smelled like a trash scow.

  The old deckhand held his arms wide open and proclaimed, “The mystic deliria, the madness amorous!”

  Captain Bawl nodded in the old man’s direction. “Old Walter there has the gist of it: we bore you to La Jocondette not three nights ago.”

  “Oh, thanks for that. It turned out to be really . . . helpful?”

  Sesstri made a face.

  “You aren’t angered?” Bawl asked. “Offended? Inspired to vengeance?”

  “Walter, it’s nice to meet you.” Cooper gripped the old lunatic’s hand and exchanged a refreshingly cordial hello, then answered the captain. “No, Captain Bawl, the worlds are ending. Or something. Kidnapping is water under the bridge at the moment.” Bawl dipped her head ambiguously.

  The old man flashed Cooper a conspiratorial smile, his eyes brimming with yellow fire from the torchlight. “I share the midnight orgies of young men, I dance with the dancers and drink with the drinkers.”

  “That sounds fun. Who are you quoting?” Cooper asked. It sounded like a quotation, anyway.

  Walter puffed out his chest. “The words of my book nothing, the drift of it everything.”

  Cooper patted the old man on the back, still filled with an odd, prophylactic glee—Walter felt more solid than his bony wrists and shoulders indicated. “You should be published, Walt.”

  Walter giggled, and dug his pole into the water with particular gusto. “Seeking something yet unfound though I have diligently sought it many a long year, singing the true song of the soul fitful at random.”

  A derisive snort came from Nixon’s side of the barge. “You’re both East Coast faggots.” Nixon sighed matter-of-factly, nodding at the old man. “But at least he’s famous.”

  Cooper looked at the old man and refocused his vision as he’d learned to do. He saw a namesign shimmer beneath the red chicken-skin of Walter’s neck: a worn folio bearing a union star and, stuffed between the pages, tufts of grass. The sign struck an unexpected chord, and as Nixon threw stones into the water, Cooper thought he might know the weathered deckhand.

  “Walt . . .” Cooper marveled under his breath, a ghost from lit class rising up from his muddled memory. “You’re already published, aren’t you?”

  Walter bobbed his head with enthusiasm. “. . . And I will show that nothing can happen more beautiful than death.”

  Cooper looked up, distracted by black figures jackknifing across the faces of the buildings overhead, and Captain Bawl cursed a string of blue pearls that would have made a Shanghai sailor blush. “Them again. Walter, can you outrace the bastards?”

  To that, Walter laughed—pealing his joy into the day. Cooper just then realized that the morning sun was a trio of violet orbs, and had been since it peeked out over the tops of the buildings. He hadn’t even noticed what flavor the sky chose to be, today. I’m getting used to this, he marveled, uncertain how he felt about that.

  “Ha!” Walter pointed his finger at Cooper in some kind of recognition. “Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself; I am large, I contain multitudes.”

  “OK.” Cooper nodded. “Then I won’t worry about it.”

  “Attaboy.” Walter poled them beneath a low bridge supported by double- sided, gape-mouthed stone faces, and suddenly the Dome was all Cooper could see—green and copper and gold and light in the distance, a cobbled desert separating them. The canal ran straight toward it, down the middle of the yawning plaza.

  Nixon padded across the deck and joined his countrymen at the prow, impressed by the view. He put his small hand on Cooper’s shoulder but kept his peace.

  Cooper gave Nixon a sidelong glance. “Walt, you’re not the first dead American I’ve met, but you’re by far the nicest. Also, I did my thesis on ‘Song of Myself.’ It’s a shame you have to go so crazy to keep up around here, but I reckon that bird is already half-cooked as far as yours truly is concerned.” Cooper leaned against the prow of the swift but unlovely barge and couldn’t help wondering how many folks back home would pay more than a finger or some back meat to have the conversations he’d had over the last week, and how miserably he’d squandered each opportunity. Still, he couldn’t think of anything to ask the transcendentalist poet beside him.

  “Anyway, thanks for not being a dick or trying to steal my shirt.”

  Walt gave him an ogle from one wild eye, the other squinted against the sun. “Have you learned the lessons only of those who admired you, and were tender with you, and stood aside for you? Have you not learned great lessons from those who braced themselves against you, and disputed passage with you?”

  Nixon elbowed Cooper hard, and Cooper relented. “Okay, fine, but that’s kind of beside the point, isn’t it? I learned lessons I’d rather forget from the people who, um, braced themselves against me.”

  Walter rolled his eyes. “Sack up, kid.”

  “Amen, Whitman,” Nixon agreed.

  Unable to argue with that, Cooper sat down on the deck of the barge and swung his legs over the foul canal water foaming beneath the keel, and as they sped toward the gold- green eye gazing down at the city from the horizon, even the black flies of the Undertow ignored them. He wondered what he was supposed to do now, down there, in the machine below the Dome.

  Behind him, Sesstri grunted and cursed the canal.

  Walter leaned down, one gnarled hand atop his pole and quoted himself again, whispering into Cooper’s ear a sentence’s worth of advice that Cooper had been flayed, fucked, and forced to learn already—but which bore repeating: “Let your soul stand cool and composed before a million universes.”

  14

  To my students I promised that all natural laws could be bounded within the burning of wax and taper:

  “Now I must take you to a very interesting part of our subject—to the relation between the combustion of a candle and that living kind of combustion which goes on within us. In every one of us there is a living process of combustion going on very similar to that of a candle, and I must try to make that plain to you. For it is not merely true in a poetical sense—the relation of the life of man to a taper; and if you will follow, I think I can make this clear.”

  For years I thought myself the greatest possible fool, but I am now convinced that my original premise was not incorrect. Experience and experiment have revealed the relation between life and candle remains every bit as complete as I had proved. It was life that outfoxed me; and enumerated more variety in her means of perseverance than I could have ever conceived during a single lifetime.

  —Michael Faraday, A Course o
f Nine Lectures on the Chemical History of a Candle

  Killilly leaned into the wind that had arisen from nowhere and now streamed out of the Dome in all directions. From her vantage at the southwestern corner of the cobblestone desert that surrounded the Dome, the commander of the Undertow forces examined her prize. The Dome loomed like a god-sized soap bubble, lit from within by a thousand shades of green and gold, looping whorls of oxidized copper and bronze, anodyne steel and titanium, spanned by curved glass that even at this close range looked like a bauble she should be able to reach out and pluck. Soon enough she would do just that.

  The gargantuan hemisphere had begun to move, splitting down the sides. Five Dome- sized wedges began to open, achingly slow and with a sound like the ground was coughing itself to death. From between the cracks, air and light spilled out.

  The skylords had ridden south to war, and their passage left ink-black contrails in the morning sky. Already the sky above the Dome darkened with their gathering presence, still seething at the loss of their paper queen in Purseyet. Killilly had no idea how the Lady of La Jocondette had Died, and she was thankful for it: destroying the praetors and conquering the Dome had never been a sane quest, and the sooner abandoned the better. Taking advantage of the sudden opening of the Dome, now that was the kind of crazy Killilly could support, policywise— she could soften up a few cage-weakened praetorian turkeys, or at least throw fresh Undertow recruits at them long enough for her to decently sack the place.

  Conquest was a sucker’s game. Looting, on the other hand, was the sport of survivors.

  Killilly cut off her giggle when a lone skylord veered away from the procession above and plummeted toward her position. She stood up straight and watched a quiet meteor of black fog and fur streak across the cobbled plain, speeding in her direction until it landed in a cloud of dark vapor at her side— and then a prince of freedom rose, lifeless and ever-living, to gape at her from eye sockets brimming with green fire. Acid green, antifreeze- green, obsinto fumes and pond slime. As always, Killilly sensed a mocking undertone to the skylord’s lingering glances.