The Waking Engine

by David Edison

  “Much obliged and many thanks, small gentleman.” Oxnard swept the sweat from his brow with a ringed hand and nodded to Nixon.

  “No problem,” Nixon grunted from the ground.

  “I had a bit of a mood, but then I got the strangest feeling that my mother-in-law might be stopping by for a visit.” Oxnard squinted at the Dome. “So I threw together an army, just in case my hunch was correct. Do try not to die.” He strode away from the fighting, toward the capitol dominating the sky.

  Nixon crawled across the cobblestones, met the gaze of the dying girl, and tried to smile. Her fingers twitched upon the hilt of her knife, unwilling to release her weapon even as her blood ran between the stones like miniature red canalworks. Gold light flooded out from the Dome, casting them all in sunset colors.

  “Nice knife,” he said, running his finger along the blade. She made a drowning sound and blood bubbled from her nose and mouth.

  Fuck.

  “Look, doll.” Nixon put one hand on the girl’s shoulder. She doesn’t look a day over fifteen, Nixon thought. But god knows what that means, right?

  “Hey, don’t tell anybody I said this, but, ya know . . . you’re gonna be okay, okay?” He pointed at the black clouds that whirled above the Dome. “Don’t be such a sucker next time, though. Those pricks used you, and now they’re fucked and you’re dead. Sorry.”

  Then he lifted the looted knife and ran into the golden light, his pointy nose smelling glory below.

  “Kaien, no. You can save lives here, or die out there.” Purity stabbed her finger into the mason’s barrel chest, not even remotely appreciating how firm and solid it was with each and every poke. “I know I always sound like I’m right but please, this time I really am.”

  They stood at the gate to the Maidens’ Keep, which shuddered as the Dome glass that formed one whole wall fell away slowly. Kaien argued, but not with much conviction. He knew he’d be needed in a dozen places at once to save all the lives at jeopardy from structural collapses.

  “You stay here, Purity. Let me keep you safe.”

  She smiled. “You and I both know that’s absolutely not going to happen, and that you have to say it anyway.”

  He kissed her. “I’ve never felt stupid for protecting a girl before.”

  “I can’t die. I tried a lot. Worry about the people who can.”

  The First Mason’s son was far too practical to argue with that. Purity ran from the Keep, surprised to find herself legitimately concerned for her peers. The Dome glass in Bitzy’s salon would be pulling away from the rest of the room, from the building, and even Kaien couldn’t say for certain that the Keep, or any of the other buildings that shared a wall with the Dome, would not collapse. What could he do? But a structural collapse would incur far more casualties than a silly old battle.

  Just moments ago, she’d been arguing with Kaien about the unacceptable level of dust in the secret passage beneath the Dome, with Kaien insisting that the house keeping staff shouldn’t be faulted by virtue of the passageways being secret, when obviously that meant only that there was a secret house keeper, who should be sought out and reprimanded.

  Now she’d left him behind to scurry on ahead, and grime was the last of her problems. She could see the battle as she ran along the garden path: Death Boys and Charnel Girls fighting ordinary citizens and, to her surprise, the house forces of Terenz-de-Guises. Already the praetors were assembling, trampling the grass with their perfectly square formations, platinum helms gleaming beneath direct sunlight for the first time in five years. The ground continued to shake violently beneath them all.

  And then. Dead gods, the Groveheart. The Dome above had split into five identical slices, save for one which remained attached to the spike, the massive central column that had supported the Dome for aeons. As the leaves of the Dome opened, the spike lifted up and out of the ground, pulled at an angle by the tip of its slice of Dome.

  But the damage to the primordial forest was beyond anything Purity had imagined. In the center of the forest, trees as tall as towers had been pushed up and toppled over— great banks of earth pushed up and fallen away, like a giant’s fist had punched through the forest.

  And so it had. As she picked her way through the underbrush, Purity felt stronger vibrations abuse the ground, and something that looked like a golden ball pushed itself up from underground, rising in a straight line as the spike that had pierced it, now nearly horizontal, succumbed to its own weight and snapped off its portion of the opening Dome, crashing through the already-tortured forest below.

  But the gold sphere kept rising, as big a mansion. Purity hurried closer, and saw that it rose atop three tiers of telescoping platforms made from the same yellow metal. Higher and higher it rose, and Purity saw stairs spiraling up the platforms. She had to take the long way around, and found herself skirting the muddy length of the fallen spike, the portion of it that had been underground. Its tip, she noted, was not gold but corroded iron, slick with some kind of black grease. She shuddered, and found the first step.

  Like a wedding cake, the three-tiered platform rose above her, and overhead there circled a dark vortex she knew all too well from her many hours of staring longingly at the city that Fflaen had denied her. The liches were here, of course—their slaves waging the battle outside so the lords could invade from above.

  Climbing the roots of a fallen sequoia to reach the foot of the stairs, Purity saw something wet and leathery, person- sized, that glowed like a faint moon and shook on the naked dirt.

  “Help me,” croaked the wet leather, shuddering.

  Purity pushed her way past fallen slabs of earth-clay and approached the thing. It was lit from within, and she saw the bones of a person curled up inside.

  “Help,” it said again, and Purity recognized the voice as female. Desperately willing her intuition to be true, Purity tore off something she would have called a yolk sack if it hadn’t been as large as a person and covering a creature made of light, but who spoke with the voice of a woman. Her flesh streamed light, once Purity scooped away the amniotic muck, and as soon as she’d worked an arm free, the woman helped to free herself.

  Purity verged upon a question, but she knew with a thunderbolt that it could be only one person in all the worlds, thought Dead before birth, like her sister Parquetta’s miscarried child. The woman confirmed Purity’s hunch when she turned her head toward Purity—who saw the cyclopean face and the bone-crested skull, blinked, and then nearly fainted from the force of the recognition.

  As soon as she regained control of herself, Purity dropped to her knees with the speed of a thunderclap. “Oh my, oh oh my, you’re alive. You’re alive!” Purity covered her face with her hands.

  “Who is?” the aesr asked, wounded and disoriented.

  “You are!” Purity was shaking, and she hovered her hands over the glowing body. “Fflaen’s daughter, the last living aesr and the only woman in the worlds who could restore our city. Fuck me upside down, this is a day!”

  She held out her arms with reverence, lifting the creature’s enormous head by the chin and wiping off the last of the restorative mucus. Her eyes were wide.

  “Oh Prama,” she said. “We thought you Dead for so long.”

  Purity helped the weak thing to her feet, uncertain what to do. But Prama nodded her crested head at the golden sphere high above.

  “Please,” she begged, “take me there.”

  That had been Purity’s intent, but now it was a royal decree. Supporting the aesr, Purity and Prama took the first of a thousand steps.

  They made it to the first tier before Prama collapsed against the side of the second telescoped platform, leaning her head against the metal and breathing heavily. Above, the black whorl of lich-lords grew steadily larger as, slowly, the host descended.

  One dark contrail split off from the swirling mass and veered downward, speeding toward Purity and Prama with a cackle and streaks of red lightning. It landed in a cloud and drifted toward them with steep
led fingers. Fingerbones.

  Purity screamed. The lich reared back, offended.

  Purity screamed again, and pointed at the undead thing. The lich followed her finger, and looked behind itself to see if perhaps there was something relevant, but no—just an offensive child and her predictable noise.

  Purity found herself and slapped her own cheek twice, hard. She set her jaw and spoke through clenched teeth: “The undead are not welcome within the royal precinct. By the authority of my father, the Baron Kloo, who sits upon the Circle Unsung at the foot of Fflaen the Fair, I remand you to your sky. This world will not suffer the footstep of the unliving. Please leave.”

  “Oh.” It cocked its head, disregarding the once-reliable banishment of its kind from the City Unspoken. Instead it drifted closer to Purity, half- hiding behind a brace of skinned chinchilla, green eyefire aghast but exploratory. “What are you.” The lich didn’t ask the question so much as accuse Purity of existing in space through which it had chosen to move.

  “You may address me as Lady Kloo if you must, thing.” Purity snapped the retort before she could stop herself, and for a startled moment she wondered whether those would be her last words. The lich-lord seemed to be considering the same possibility, but Purity interrupted it with more insane bravado. “And who, what, and why might you be?” She pressed on. In for a nickeldime, in for a dirty, I suppose.

  The lich turned its head a fraction of an inch. “I am freedom, I am your death, and I am because the world isss unfair to pretty little girlsss who wander where they oughtn’t.” It raised a bony hand that radiated a cold beyond cold and pointed to Prama, still slumped against the wall of the platform. “I have come to retrieve my slave.”

  Purity lifted her chin and stared the thing straight in its flaming eye sockets. “Really! I don’t think I’ll let a fleshless nobody accost me in my own home. Have you any idea what my friends will do to you when they see the revolting way you’ve styled your hair? Staple all the chunky gold in the worlds to your face, bless your tiny coal heart, and it still won’t hide that mess you piled atop your head.” She forced herself to sound snide but had to admit, it wasn’t as hard as perhaps it ought to be.

  “I beg your pardon?” If the lich had eyelids it would have gaped, and it pressed one ring-barnacled claw against its chest.

  “Bitzy will have fits, and then we’ll have to bleach lich-droppings out of our slippers. Have you any idea how hard it is to lift putrefaction humors from satin?” She looked the thing up and down; was it naked under those furs? “No, I daresay you might not.”

  “Oh? Girl. Woe to those with the poor sense to love you. They wake to misery today.”

  But Prama cried out, a sound somewhere between a keening wail and a war cry. Groaning with the effort, she stood: and a woman robed in sunlight stepped forward, radiating brilliance from her skin. Pinprick lights danced up her sides and curled around her bare breasts. Bright things like wings or windblown drapery fluttered behind her, and her crested head was obscured by a cowl of light. She stood nearly twice as tall as Purity, and walked past the young noblewoman as if she did not exist.

  The lich retreated before the Prama’s illuminated approach. Wing- shaped protuberances on her buttocks and back wafted wide open, their tips shining like the sun.

  Bells, but she’s tall when she’s not hunched over and moaning, Purity thought.

  “Do you know my given name, lich?” Prama’s voice was low and sweet and ripe with pain. “We have tasted each other, you and I. Would you like another sip?”

  “Oh?” The lich giggled and looked around as if seeking an exit. “Not necessary, really.” It drifted back further, almost to the precipice of the platform. Below lay the wooden corpses of the Groveheart, tossed with mud.

  She stared unblinking at the lich from one single eye that was set in the middle of her crest and burned several colors at once. “The fun we’ll have,” she promised, low and throaty.

  “Please. Forgive me. Your grace.” The lich shuddered. “I seek amnesty!”

  “Not an option.” A smile like clouds parting, and a shake of her luminous head.

  Prama sighed, a sound like a pipe organ wrestling a piccolo, and flared her open wing-fins. She focusing her light on a point inches from the lich’s fur-swathed chest.

  “I will do you a kindness,” Prama said sweetly, “and grant you the mercy you denied me, for so long. Although it will hurt.”

  The ball of light inched toward the lich, who appeared paralyzed, and as the light touched its chest the undead thing began to howl. Into the black substance swathing its body Prama pushed the ball of light, and the lich-lord’s rusty bones began to glow with a cleansing, golden light. The green fire in its eyes flickered yellow, then gold, and finally its skull was transformed into pure quartz crystal, clear but riddled with milky flaws.

  The fire disappeared from its eyes, the black smoke melted away from its bones, and the lich-lord collapsed in a pile, a crystal skull amidst bones of shattered glass.

  “The cure for undeath,” Prama turned to Purity, “is life.” Then she collapsed, sobbing, and Purity could not bring herself to touch the sunlit heir.

  “That’s her!” a man’s voice called out from the stairs below. “That’s the aesr we saved atop the towers! That’s the woman who’s been screaming at me for days!”

  A man and a woman rushed up the steps behind them. Sesstri nodded at Purity but immediately began tending to the wounded, traumatized aesr.

  “Who are you?” Cooper asked Purity.

  “Who are you?” she replied.

  “I’m CooperOmphale, and I’m the center of the goddamned metaverse.”

  Purity clucked. Why fight? “And I am Lady Purity Kloo, daughter of Baron Emil Kloo, who sits on the Circle Unsung. And this,” she indicated Prama, “is Prince Fflaen’s daughter, Prama-Ramay Afflaena-Uchara.”

  Cooper shrugged. “I saved her, you know. After a whole lotta torture.”

  “So,” Purity said through clenched teeth, “did I.”

  No one inside the Dome would have recognized their prince as he crawled out of the earth. The creature who’d ruled them had been ineffable, cyclopean, and made of light. The wretch who returned to the scene of his crime looked none of these things. He’d crawled across rock as sharp as glass and pulled himself up through half a hundred different stairwells, many empty of stairs, when he’d scaled the ancient wells with his fingers and toes and an ugly determination to put right what he’d abandoned.

  Asher’s first breath of topside air filled his lungs with the scents he’d forgotten—wet peat, moss, the bark- and-vine smell of the old forest, which had grown here before his ancestors arrived to build a city. Behind him, the billionstone bones of the Petite Malaison shone through cracks and windows of the building like sunlight. He was home. She was home.

  “Is it time, then?” a voice asked from beneath an arbor. “All the fun will be over, you know.” Oxnard Terenz-de-Guises fiddled with his rings. He sounded almost sad.

  “You had fun,” Asher answered. “I had pain.”

  “Oh, I don’t know about that.” The marquis rolled a chip across his knuckles and savored a little smile. “It wasn’t entirely unpleasant, was it? You met your lady love, gambled and drank with an old friend. We had times, Your Grace. We had times.”

  Asher said nothing. Formal language hurt his ears, after so long a time away, and so many crimes that made him unworthy of it.

  “You never told me why you did it. Why you locked them up.” Oxnard peered out from beneath his black brows.

  “They deserved it.”

  Terenz-de-Guises put his hand on his friend’s shoulder. “And you didn’t?”

  Asher looked up, perhaps a million years old, looking like a child who was sorry he’d been bad. “I should have been. It was simple selfishness that stopped me, nothing more.”

  “She’s here, you know. Of course you know— but . . .” Oxnard bit his lip and looked, for once, noble. “She will make
all the difference in the worlds, Your Grace. And you can be free, then, at last.”

  Asher nodded, his eyes watering. His cindercysts had already begun to regrow; he could feel them burning between his ribs. It wouldn’t be long.

  “Did you find your red metal jewelry box, milord?” he asked.

  Oxnard pulled a rueful face. “Not yet. I’ve one place left to search, and I’m afraid she’ll put up a fight.”

  It hurt Asher to chuckle, but he did. His sides were on fire, and his skin felt white-hot. Soon, it would be exactly that. “We’ll help.”

  “It’s about time you reverted to the royal we, Your Grace.” Oxnard turned to go.

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  “I know.” Oxnard pointed at the golden machine that had pushed itself up through the Groveheart until it towered over the shredded forest. Above, the Dome was gone, blossomed into petals of mountain- sized rubble. “It’ll be a hard climb in your condition. You’d best hurry.”

  “Not coming?”

  Oxnard held out his hands to mime a weighted scale. “I’m craven, but I like to make an entrance. I haven’t yet decided.”

  “I’ll see you soon, then. Craven fool.” Asher limped toward the ruined center of what was once the Dome.

  Lallowë and Almondine stepped out of the portal into the spherical chamber as one, their arms linked in a pantomime of delicacy. Almondine’s face appeared first, a heart-shaped blankness framed by an auburn bob. Lallowë’s black hair faded into existence next, her lips pursed tightly against a storm of conflicting emotions and violent impulses. Their slippered feet touched the gold floor at the same time, and they nodded to each other before surveying the engine room.

  Lallowë looked down. This is it, then, the vivisistor at the heart of the City Unspoken. Mother’s dead prize.