Liavek 6

by Will Shetterly

  "Well as I care to." Copper reached for the cartwheel. "If you don't want it—"

  Niaru snatched up the coin. "You'll have your charm an hour after sunset. If I were you, till then I'd search my heart."

  "Now there's a bootless errand," Copper said, and went out.

  Copper went back to his room, changed into his black leather jacket and heavy riding trousers. The stable next door hired him a horse, and he headed west, along the trade road until he was out of sight of Saltigos, then to the north, to follow the path of the railway.

  It took him more than three hours to reach what seemed to be the spot. Copper dismounted, hitched the horse to the rails, and began to search. He was not entirely sure what he was searching for—but when he saw the clearing, and the large flat stone deliberately set level upon two smaller boulders, he knew he had found it. The thing would not have been done in a small, furtive basement, he knew.

  Copper crouched next to the stone table, found a small brown stain, dripped down from above. He stood, took a step backward, stretched out his arm; then he followed its line until he found the stained knife, half-buried in the dirt where it had been thrown.

  There wasn't much blood here. A body contained a lot of blood. But that there was any blood at all must have come as a terrible shock, to a man expecting a miracle.

  Copper worked out the rest of it, in backwards order. He went back to the flat stone, took three steps directly away from it, then walked in a circle around it at a three-pace radius. He stopped at a small pile of stones, bent and unstacked them, pulled out a red opal pendant in the shape of a heart, on a fine gold chain.

  It would be necessary for a magician, especially a novice, to put her luck vessel out of useful range before the ritual, so that no involuntary magic was done in the hot moment. Removing the thing would call for a little ceremony, a little burial.

  Copper wondered what Krisia had been thinking, when the knife came down.

  What had Syvann, when the hammer fell?

  Copper put the pendant inside his jacket, went back to his horse, and rode for Saltigos.

  •

  It was a quarter-hour to midnight. On the Saltigos platform, Copper was oiling the rods of Black Stallion, a full-sized road engine, built mostly of iron and steel. It was the largest the Railway possessed, over twice the length of little Brazen Venture. its six red-spoked driving wheels as high as Copper's waist. The firebox glowed cherry red, and the stoker auger, driven by the engine's own steam, grumbled as it pulled sea-coal from the bunker behind the cabin.

  "I don't like this," Zelle said.

  ''The parcel came in," Copper said, not as a question.

  "Oh, there's a parcel. Brought in by some gibbering fat clown who wanted me to think he was a sea captain—kept pulling his hat down to hide his hair."

  "And what's in the box?"

  Zelle looked hard at Copper for a moment. "You're damn right I opened it. It's some scrolls. I can't read them, neither can Omalfi."

  ''Then go get some rest. Omalfi can join you as soon as he lights me up."

  "You're supposed to have a live stoker on Black."

  ''That's a Driving Department rule. I just revoked it."

  Zelle said, "Copper. What's going on? What's out there?"

  "An iron engine on sixty miles of steel track," Copper said. "Fire and metal and that's all."

  Omalfi came around the back end of Black Stallion. "Could be lonely, then," the wizard said, and then very carefully, "You're sure you don't want company on this trip, Copper?"

  "I'm sure. Start the torch, will you?"

  Omalfi shrugged and went to the front of the engine. He chanted and gestured, and a brilliant blue-white light appeared in the headlight box. The light was grainy, and made everything it shone on seem curiously fiat and decolored, but it threw twice as far as the best spirit lamps, necessary at the speeds Black could reach.

  Copper climbed into the cabin. "Now hand me up the dispatch."

  Zelle did so. Omalfi came around behind her, put his hand on her shoulder. "Copper," he said, quietly, clearly.

  Copper turned, his hand on the throttle lever.

  Omalfi said, "You know we're your friends, Copper."

  "I know that,” Copper shouted above the steam and the roar and the rumble of coal, and dropped the throttle. Black Stallion moved forward into the night. Copper thought once of looking back, but did not.

  It was because Omalfi was his friend that he had gone to someone else for the magic chain. He wanted it to be purchased for cold money; to have no love whatsoever in its making, to be just a thing, a tool.

  Once the lights of Saltigos had dwindled, he let the big engine have its head, the stoker thrumming, heat rising from the firebox, moonlight catching the rods like a lightning storm sweeping down the coast. He looked up: Tonight the high moon was made of steel, a white engine racing Black. The moon paced well, Copper thought, but she could not win. Black was the fastest thing ever made by man, the fastest on earth, and in time they would build engines faster still. Copper looked ahead, along the beam of lucklight, and knew that they would need something better for the eyes of the engines to come; power would exceed the reach of power.

  He drove on like that, alone with his dream, the pulse of pistons, the tick of the brass-cased clock, until the distance was covered to the place of sacrifice; he began slowing before he saw her, and had Black Stallion bridled to a walk when Krisia appeared in the light.

  "Good evening," he said to her, "going to Liavek tonight?" and boosted her into the cabin. She looked around, as if startled by the big machine. Perhaps she was, Copper thought; Venture seemed cozy and friendly, in oak and brass, while Black's iron mass could seem forbidding, though Black was actually the easier engine to drive. It was all in knowing what the metal truly meant.

  "Would you hold on now, Mistress Krisia?" Copper said. "I wouldn't want to lose you."

  "Of course, Master Copper," Krisia said.

  "Thank you," Copper said, and eased out the throttle. They rolled on. Copper turned back to face Krisia, leaned toward her. "And now, if you'll do me a small service—"

  He pulled a length of gold chain from his pocket and tossed it around Krisia's wrists; pulled it tight. He wrapped the other end around his own left wrist. "I have to see you home tonight," he said. "I trust you understand."

  Krisia gave him an utterly blank look. She did not tug at the chain; she did not even seem to notice it. Drawing the chain taut between them, Copper turned back to the controls, looked out at the track ahead.

  The tracks fell away below the engine. The Silverspine tilted and began to slip by. Wind rushed past the cabin windows as Black Stallion, all ten tons of it, rose into the sky. They did not seem to be flying; they did not seem to be moving at all, though Copper's stomach rolled and he felt dizzy. Bracing his feet, he turned.

  Krisia was not there.

  Someone else was.

  A woman in a shimmering blue robe stood across the cabin from Copper, her hands bound with the spell-chain just as Krisia's had been. She was taller than Krisia by at least a span, fully as tall as Copper.

  Her face and hands seemed to be made of liquid silver, smooth and agonizingly beautiful. Her hair was a curve of dark-grained metal, her eyes blue star sapphires.

  Copper failed at first to speak, and then said, "Was it ever the girl? Or only you?"

  "She is still here," the Lady said. "Within me. Or, in another sense, I stand within her. Both at once. Do you understand, o man?”

  "Not very well."

  The Lady laughed, metal chimes. "Little dark man, who would hold the universe under a glass, yet cannot understand a simple trick of presence." She did not sound mocking; rather like a mother whose child has tried too hard to be clever. She held up her hands, pulled gently at the chain. "But since you cannot be certain who I am, how can you know I am that which you wish to hold?'

  If you cease to want the spirit held, it will go free. "You are here," Copper said carefully.
"So you are the one."

  "Very well. As you see, it hardly limits me." She pointed out the window. The planet was distantly below them now; they were halfway to the moon, stars drifting past, white, red, gold.

  Copper kept the chain taut. "If we're to discuss your limits … what did you promise Rion Daaveh?"

  "That Krisia would become the Goddess of Railways, if given to me freely. And so it shall happen, soon enough."

  "When enough people believe in you? That's all you are, isn't it? The sum of people believing in you."

  The Lady smiled. "You think that is a small thing, do you."

  "You make people kill and die. That's not small. But you…" He shook his head.

  "You believe in me," the Lady said, "in the evidence of your eyes and your hands? Don't you, Copper?"

  Copper could hear the pleading in the Lady's voice, not even disguised. Or perhaps that was the disguise, the appeal, the lie itself.

  "How can I?" Copper said. "You've tricked my eyes and hands three nights running. I haven't a stick to measure you against… No, Lady, I don't believe in you."

  "Others have. Others close to you."

  "I thought that might be it. You'd be the one they call the Light. I thought you were a man."

  "Another reflection of me is. I am the Light of the night sky, the Moon."

  "Reflected sunlight."

  "Are you so sure?" She pointed at the Moon, which now filled the view above the engine, shining brilliantly white. "Do I not have my own light?"

  "You reflect the sun, or there would be no darkness shading your face." Copper pointed at the huge moon nearby, the shadowed mountains along the terminator.

  "O man, o sophist!" the Lady said. "You think this iron beast of yours so mighty, yet against this immensity—" She tried to gesture at the space around them, but Her hands were held, "can you not see how tiny it is? You think you have made a hammer to break the gods, but it will break only your bones and your upstart spirit. When this machine goes crashing into its glass temple outside the city, when you are slivered with glass and scalded with steam, when you lie in your own boiling blood on hot iron, you will know some little of power … as will all those who behold your dying. You will fall, o man, and many thousands will kneel."

  "I know a little of it now," Copper said, and pulled the spell-chain. "If I fall, you fall with me."

  "Little dark man, do you think that your flimsy charm can hold one whose very stuff is magic?"

  "I think so," Copper said. "I think even gods are subject to rules. Don't you, blue Lady?"

  "Take this chain from me."

  "No."

  "Take it off or I will shrivel you like a salted slug."

  "Do it then."

  "Take it off and I will love thee as no woman of dust and blood ever can."

  "Nor ever has," Copper said, and pulled the chain tight around their three wrists.

  The Lady hissed like a cracked steampipe. Then she stopped, and smiled again, but hesitantly. "Never, Copper? Never?" Copper knew the voice very well. It was Syvann's. The Lady's face had changed too, trying to shift into Syvann's image. But it was not working: the picture was not Syvann but a crooked mask, a sculpture ruined in the firing.

  The truth was, Copper knew now, that he had let Syvann go a long time ago; there was no more freedom he could give her.

  He pulled the chain from the Lady's wrists, flung it out the cabin window. It exploded into a streak of golden fire against the starry darkness.

  "If that frees you," he said, "then you are free."

  The Lady struggled, but seemed unable to move at all now. She cried, "I am everything that the moon is, or was, to any mortal who is or ever was. I am the cool blue moon of your dreams, the liquid white moon of your lusts, the bloody moon of your hatreds. All this and many more. What am I to you, o man, that you will not love me?"

  "A stone," Copper said. "A worldstone like the one we cling to, barren and not so beautiful, a long distance away across whatever the dark is. You are out of our grasp now, stone … but not beyond our reach, I think."

  "You will touch me, without loving me?" the Lady said. "Do you know what a touch without love is, o small dark man?"

  "Oh yes, bright Lady. I know very well what that is."

  "What do you want? Power, pleasure, immortality?"

  Copper clenched his teeth.

  "Deity then? It is possible."

  "That least of all. "

  "Have you no heart at all, little dark man?" The sapphire eyes were wide, though there were no tears in them, and the silver flesh was taut. "Let me see!" She looked straight into his eyes: straight into him.

  Copper felt his heart swelling up into his throat, banging like the track gangs' mallets, killing him blow by blow. He took a step back, bumped against something: it was the brass cabin clock on its wall hook. He got his hands around it, lifted it to throw at the Lady, feeling its metal pulsing through his fingers, faint tick-tick against the lunatic hammering down his left arm to his heart.

  The stars in the Lady's eyes went from white to copper to blood-red, and Her metal lips smiled. It was what She wanted, of course. For him to smash the clock and acknowledge Her.

  Copper put the clock up again. He sagged against the wall. He pressed his fingertips against the clock's glass face, feeling the tick, watching the crawl of the indicator, trying to match his heart to the ticking, his breathing to the sweep.

  Human hands made this clock, he thought, his lips forming the words though he lacked the breath to push them out, and built this engine, and laid the tracks it rides on. All of them were needed, all of them did their part. Lady, Lady, what do we need you for?

  He held still, not quite kneeling. The rush of wind past the cabin had stopped (or perhaps his own blood's hammering had deafened him to it) and the engine revolved, still affecting no sense but the eyes, so that the white face of the Moon was behind the Lady, silhouetting Her against its awful barrenness. The red light in Her eyes went out.

  "So now I know," Her voice said, a ringing in a hollow brazen vessel. "Any power would I have given you, any answer, all answers. But you wish not answers, but reasons." She looked down at him. "So die then. With nothing."

  The Lady's smooth metal face tore like tissue, crumpled away. Beneath it was a white face, like chalk, scarred and pitted and blotched. She wept tears of stone that tore rilles down Her cratered cheeks, and dust rose, but there was no fire, no lap of water, no cries of populations driven from broken cities: there was no one there at all.

  The face went red, and darkness eclipsed it.

  The world was half white, half black, and roaring.

  Copper put his hands to his eyes, to be certain they were open. To his right there was darkness and a distant speck of moon. To his left the Liavek city wall flashed past like a stream of liquid. Someone was clutching at Copper's legs. He looked, though he was frightened that it would not be Krisia; but it was. Ahead of the engine was the last, long left-hand curve around the wall, just before the Station.

  Where, at this speed, they would crash with enough force to bring the roof down, explode the boiler. Provided they even made it around the bend.

  A diagram drew itself in Copper's mind, of curve and momentum. If he opened Black up, they would break the rails and go hurtling straight out onto the plains above the Saltmarsh. He and Krisia would die. There might be something left of the engine. The Station would rattle with the noise.

  And everyone there would rush out to see the wreck, and marvel at the insoluble mystery of it. No. That would not do. Copper put his hand on the throttle. He looked down at the girl, who still held on to him.

  "Can you smother fire by magic?" he shouted. It was a simple trick, he had heard, one that beginners usually mastered early.

  Krisia touched her throat. "If I—if I had—"

  The chart was still clear in Copper's mind, the space and time left to them. He knew best of anyone living what it took to stop Black Stallion at its ordinary top speed
, and they were traveling twice that.

  He had done everything he could to stay true to himself, but he had reached the limit of what metal and wood and the craft of hands could do.

  Copper reached into his jacket and took hold of the opal pendant, Krisia's luck piece: he pulled the heart out of his chest and gave it to the girl. Krisia gave a small cry as she clutched the pendant. She reached out to Black's firebox. She began to chant.

  Copper shoved the throttle up and threw his weight on the brake wheel. Black Stallion screamed with its whole being. Sparks flew from the wheels. Metal shuddered.

  They began to slow.

  They took the curve at sixty miles an hour, rocking, bending the rails as far as welds and spikes would take—but not farther. The Station came into view, light through colored glass, waiting for them. Copper held the brake over, looked at the firebox: it had gone dark. They were not rolling now but sliding, the wheels at full stop, grinding against the rails. The brake shoes must surely have burned through by now—would have, Copper realized, except for Krisia's spell. She was a novice. She lacked control. She was terrified, like any sane person would have been. She had made a bottomless pit of cold in the center of Black Stallion, and it was sucking heat out of the boiler, the brakes, the wheels. Frost was starting to form on the gauges. They might actually freeze to the rails.

  They would have a charm to make sudden heat, he thought, and one for instant cold. The charms would sit in every engine cabin on the Railway, produced as common trade items by common-trade magicians, and in time no one would even think of them as being magical.

  Black slid into Liavek Station wreathed in not steam but cold fog, creaking and squealing to a stop just at the center of the platform. It cracked a side rod, blew a rivet that shot upward, shattering a pane in the roof; Copper threw himself over Krisia as glass showered down. The moon was bright and awful through the open space.

  Copper stood up slowly. Standing on the platform, entirely alone, was Rion Daaveh.

  Copper helped Krisia to her feet, put her on the platform. "I've brought her home, old man," Copper said, "now see you take care of her." He wanted to make it a threat, but he was much too tired. He supposed that Krisia would leave Rion Daaveh very soon—and even if she did not, she was in no more danger from her uncle. There were things one could only find the courage for once.