Dead of Veridon (Burn Cycle)

by Tim Akers

  In that fraction of a second I saw pipes. A dozen of them, arranged into two rows perpendicular to the current, their heights and arrangement staggered in almost random ways. They were a new construction, the rock at their bases raw, their brass untouched by time or river.

  Crane had installed them. There was his broadcasting facility. That's how he was getting his voice into the Mother.

  I pulled myself back down into the calm waters of the pit. Step by step, I worked my way up the sloped incline toward the pipe array. About halfway up I noticed that the ground clutter of smashed skulls and hollow ribs was mostly clear. Here, the rock floor was a webwork of conduit. It was flush with the rock, and freshly laid. More of Crane's work. I felt nothing when I touched it, though, so it must have been insulated. The voices diminished the farther I got from the door, and the current was dragging on me again, now that I was out of the lee of the pit. This was beginning to look like a bad idea.

  A gust of the current lifted me and slammed me back into the rock. I gasped, then slammed the slow-closing grapple into the conduit. Another rope of current got under me, and again I was nearly cast back into the river. The grapple finally closed on the metal and I was able to secure myself. The suit only had the one pincer arm, though. What I wouldn't have done for a drill, or a jacksaw.

  If I left my hand grappled and bent my legs, so that I was standing in a threepoint stance, I could clearly see the pipe array. If I had something large enough, a net or a log, I could have thrown them down river and tangled them in the pipes. If they were just brass, the additional drag from the log would have... never mind. It was just hopeful thinking. There was no 'log' accessory in the iron suit. I sighed and craned my neck for a better view.

  The current almost took me, lifting my feet off the ground and flipping me over like a see-saw. My wrist torqued, and I heard the grapple groan unhappily against the metal conduit. The current slammed me onto the riverbed, nearly dislodging me. I hung there like a flag in a hurricane, screaming at the top of my lungs. Eventually I was able to pull myself down and, dragging along with both arms and the cog-assisted strength of the iron suit, got back into my original situation. I was about to release the grapple and scurry back into the safety of the door when I noticed that my little accident had done a great deal of damage to the conduit. It was pried free of the rock and the thick sheathing had burst. Its metallic guts were exposed to the river. They looked like jellybeans, clear and red and smashed together. I brushed my hand against them.

  The suit glowed, the lights flaring again before popping out. The voice came back to my head, loudly.

  "What was that?" Crane asked the air. I pulled my hand away, and the lights inside my suit died back to their tranquil glow. The externals didn't come back at all.

  Crane wasn't inside. He was in the city, somewhere, communicating with the Fehn via these pipes. And something about the conduits that connected the pipes to the Fehn interacted with the suit. Well. Time to go for broke.

  I grappled myself to a different part of the riverbed, then thrust my hand deep into the bubbly red material inside the conduit. There was an immediate snap as the suit surged, all of the systems redlining, the heat sudden and unbearable. Even the grappler creaked as it began to crush the rock beneath it. Crane's voice filled my head, urgent and frightened and then in pain, such pain. Between my fingers the smooth red pebbles in the conduit shivered and grew. The grappling hand snapped shut, grinding the stone into dust that was swept away in the current.

  And then the suit went dark. Completely dark. The systems shut down, the internal lights faded into nothing, and I was crushed by an incredible weight. Without power-assisted joints, the iron suit crushed me to the riverbed. The last thing I saw as the glass dome of my helmet cracked into the rock was the bubbly red material in my right hand. The smooth pebbles shivered once more, then went dark, fading from brilliant red to black in the blink of an eye. The fingers of that hand were suddenly cold, and then I was on the floor and couldn't turn my head. Had more important things on my mind.

  For example, the air quality quickly went from poor to intolerable. Wilson had said something about the oxygen being recycled and refreshed by something in the suit. If that wasn't happening anymore, I only had the small pockets of air between my body and the suit. If the quality of the air I was gasping right now was any indication, that wouldn't hold out for long.

  And the suit itself was heavy. Now that the initial shock of losing control had passed, I was able to push myself up a little. Easier in water, would have been impossible on land, but even in the river it was quite a task. Every joint met with resistance. Getting my hand uncurled so I could get a proper pushup going used muscles in my hand and wrist that I didn't even know I had. And I had to fight against the current as well as the suit. All this effort was using up my air pretty quick.

  I thought about throwing myself into the current. That would at least get me downriver. Maybe a lucky eddy would wash me up on shore. That was unlikely. Lurch forward now and I'd end up over the waterfall, nine times out of ten. Well. At least I'd get to open my helmet and breath sweet, sweet air one last time.

  Since I was on an incline, I just let my shoulder collapse and roll me down the hill toward the massive door of the Fehn. That would get me out of the current, at least. Of course, it also got me into the carpet of cog-dead who had perished on the Mother's doorstep. It was like a slow motion horror show as I tumbled through that detritus, bones popping as my limp arms thrashed through them. The water filled with a sediment of broken jaws and separated legs and scraps of hair. With the lights out, I could only see this as a patchwork against my helmet.

  But there was light. Struggling and gasping for air, I propped myself up and turned toward the bluish glow of the doors. Those pie-shaped bits of glass were pulsing, brighter and brighter, until they locked into a constant brilliance. The rock beneath me shook, and the door separated into six wide slices that met in the middle and, like a fist unclenching, opened. There was a brief current as water was sucked toward the opening, and air belched out. Inside there was light and, apparently, the possibility of air. It was all I had.

  Slowly, painfully, I pulled myself to the door and inside the bunker. My arms and legs were bleeding, pinched by the unpowered joints of the suit. My head was pounding. The air was nearly gone, each breath a long, thin gasp that left my lungs hungry. When I collapsed to the floor, the doors began to close. I thought it was too late. That I couldn't even move to unseal the suit and let air in. That the doors were closing too slowly. That I was going to die here, on the bottom of the Reine, with a carpet of the undead as my funeral pillow. That it was getting awfully dark, and awfully cold.

  I WOKE UP SHIVERING. The light around me was even and warm. Very white. When I breathed in, the air was clean and cold. I opened my eyes. Still in the suit, but the seams were open. My helmet was unsealed, the glass leaves of the dome pulled back. The edges of my vision were spotted, but otherwise I felt okay.

  Not spotted. There were tiny black circles on the glass of the helmet. I raised my arm, freeing it from the unbuttoned sleeve of the suit, and a rain of oblong black forms cascaded from my skin. I sat up and tried to shout, but my mouth was clogged. Hadn't I been breathing clean air, so sweet, just a second ago? I gagged, and wriggling black slugs fell into my lap. I screamed again, and this time got it off. A nice, high pitched shriek. I was sitting in the middle of a sea of the squirmy little bastards. They cleared away from me like I'd dropped fire on their heads, rippling away like a scabrous pond.

  The room I was in was small, the walls and floor apparently metal. I say apparently, because all I could see was the small area around the suit, where I had just scared away all those little slugs. They were a couple inches long, about an inch wide. Black. They writhed over each other, blindly sensing each other. They clustered around the corners of the room.

  These were the Fehn in their purest form. The walking dead that we usually referred to as Fehn were really
just symbiotes. Carriers. Those who died in the river risked joining their ranks. The slugs filled them, choked their lungs and veins, ate out their brains and leeched onto their muscles. They maintained something like their living personalities, only infinitely older. Sadder. And they spoke as one, with the river.

  You usually didn't see them naked like this. Every once in a while there would be a report of a vein of squirming blackness among the currents of the river. People would stay off the river for a week. Then everyone would go back to normal, and we'd forget about it.

  The light in the room came from a globe, about three feet in diameter, supported on a pillar of the writhing Fehn-slugs. The globe was held in a carapace of silver, a framework of plates and pipes that looked like armor, only they did nothing to conceal the brilliant globe of light within. Perhaps it was some kind of containment device, like the filament structure that held the element in a frictionlamp. The pillar shifted liquidly, and the globe got closer. Turned to me, like a giant eye.

  "Apologies, user. Certain subroutines are proactive." The voice came out of the room, as though the walls were talking. Perfect monotone, no inflection. And very few words that I understood.

  "Certain sub-teens are damned creepy," I muttered. "I take it you're the Mother Fehn."

  Globe-on-a-stick rotated slightly, precisely, then back, a dozen times. Like an escapement, each rotation very crisp.

  "Acceptable," it replied.

  "Right. Acceptable." I stood up, shivering as a handful of Fehn-slugs clattered to the floor, falling from hidden folds of my person. "Sorry about those pipes. Hope I didn't cause you any discomfort."

  "The fetters. The user was disconcerted about their removal. His displeasure was measured corporeally." Rotate, spin, slither closer. "Remunerations are due."

  "Uh, so." I backed away, stepping carefully out of the suit. "You're upset by this?"

  "Remunerations are due, and the balance will be paid." The whole pillar undulated as the Mother approached, its base a carpet of slugs. As it approached, the carpet overran my suit. Halfway through consuming it the Mother paused and lowered her eye-globe to the ground. "New schematic. Processing."

  The slugs in the room shifted, then dived for the suit. I pranced out of the way as they swarmed over the iron carapace. I wasn't going to be able to get back in there, no matter what. The memory of wriggling slugs in my throat was too much, and watching them treat the suit like a lunch buffet was disconcerting. That could be me, if I hadn't woken up.

  "Archived," the Mother declared, then returned her attention to me. "Remuneration."

  I held out my hands. I didn't want to be remunerated, whether that meant the Mother intended to pay me, or if it felt I owed it something. Didn't want to know what sort of currency the Mother of the Fehn dealt in.

  "The man who fettered you - wait a second." She was still approaching me. "The man who installed those pipes and killed all of your children, his name is Ezekiel Crane. Or Maker, if you know that name."

  That stopped her. If a giant globe of light on top of a pillar of squirming slugs could ever be called curious, then the Mother Fehn was curious.

  "The Family Maker was exiled in the eightieth year of the Reclamation, as declared by the Founders of the city. Their kin was purged. Their tree was burned to the root."

  Strange to hear such an alien creature speaking in metaphor. I shrugged, then explained what I knew of Crane. What he had done, and what he was trying to do. She waited attentively until I was done. I ended with my theory that Crane had allowed himself to be captured by the angel Camilla, although I could only speculate as to what end. The Mother didn't move for several seconds, then turned to face me with its broad, glowing eye.

  "These are relevant historical notes. Thank you for entering them into the archive. Will user be available to supplement the archive following the events at the Church of the Algorithm?"

  "Supplement?" I asked.

  "This line of history is not complete. We would like our records to be accurate."

  "I'm not recording this for history. I want to know if there's anything you can do about it."

  "Record. Archive. Report," the Mother said. "What we have always done."

  "Is there anything you can tell me about how to stop it?"

  "Disambiguate. Stop recording. Stop archiving. Stop ambient lighting function. Stop communications..."

  "Stop it," I snapped, then realized that would just require further disambiguation. "I need to know how to stop Crane from destroying the city. I need to know what he's done to Camilla, or what he plans to do."

  "Conjecture. Outside of parameters. Restate."

  "Gods in hell, this was a valuable outing." I rubbed my face, then started when I opened my eyes. The slugs had formed a circle around me, leaving only a few feet in all directions. "Get these damned things away from me!"

  "Clarify range requirements."

  "Away!"

  "Estimating," the Mother said, then rotated slightly. The slugs backed off. Four inches.

  "Much, much farther away," I snapped. The slugs fled to the far corners of the room. I sighed. "Good enough. Now. What was it that Valentine said about you. That you were something like a library, only a mad little bit of one? That seems pretty accurate. Mother, what do you know about Crane's plans for Camilla?"

  "Cross-referencing previous user with queries regarding the servitor colloquially known as Camilla. Result. Transcript begins..."

  "Summarize," I said.

  "Summary. There are three hundred fifty three direct instances of nodal activity on this subject. Fifty-two additional instances can be related to similar..."

  "Never mind. Give me the transcript."

  "Verbal or printed?"

  "Printed?"

  Paper appeared. For all the world, it looked like a pile of slugs in the corner vomited a neat stack of papers, and there were fewer slugs in that area afterward. It was as creepy a bit of administrative work as I've ever seen.

  But the transcript was fascinating. Crane spent a lot of time struggling with the Mother's peculiar way of communicating. He kept interrupting her and restating his questions in continually more complicated ways. I lost the train of their conversation frequently. But so did Crane, if the number of times he had to start his line of questioning over from the beginning was any indication.

  A pattern emerged. There were two lines of inquiry. First, Crane asked a lot of questions about the connection between how cogwork and the Artificers' magic worked. Apparently they were the same discipline, differently practiced. I didn't know enough about that to really understand it, other than to say that Wilson's theory was correct. Ezekiel's crows served the same purpose as the maker beetles, providing material and schematics to whatever the user was trying to create. Where he lost me was the connection between the maker beetles and foetal metal.

  Cogwork was created through the use of foetal metal, a silvery liquid similar to mercury, only more pewter in color. Some sort of pattern was imposed on the metal, usually through the use of memorized calculations and other near-mystic mental techniques. Understanding how those patterns were formed was the Wright's talent, supposedly gifted to him by his years of study in the revelation of the Algorithm. The metal was then injected into the subject, and cogwork formed like crystals in suspension. This was why cogwork only functioned in living creatures, why the zepliners required the living machine of the pilot to function. Something about the blood, or the flesh.

  And apparently the Artificers worked in similar ways, except they seemed to believe that the foetal metal was already in all living things, and only needed to be tapped. I would call it crazy, but I had lost track of the meaning of that word in the last couple days. After all, I was having a conversation with a ball of light and a pillar of slugs. Crazy was relative.

  Crane's second line of questioning involved the workings of something called a servitor. The Mother Fehn had referred to Camilla as a servitor, I recalled. There was nothing about her that seemed v
ery servant-like to me. Then again, when we had spoken two years ago she referred to herself as a messenger, and the one pursuing me as a destroyer. As though she had been built for one purpose, and he had been built for another. And the key to those roles had been their cog-hearts. The pattern of their design depended on those hearts. Without them, they could not hold together for long. With them, they could rewrite themselves into different tasks, depending on the heart. Camilla had wanted the destroyer's heart, so she could free herself and wreak a little vengeance on the city.

  The connection hit me like a bolt out of the sky. Camilla and her angel-kind used the most complicated patterns the city of Veridon had ever seen. Every technology, every bit of cogwork, was simply a derivation on those patterns. A cutting from the mother tree. We had never been able to access the true pattern at the center of the heart. Never would, since it was far too complicated for the memorization tricks that the Wrights employed. The pattern had to been held in your mind, while the foetal metal was applied.

  But if the foetal metal could be applied directly to the pattern, what then? What would come of that? And if the Artificers were right, and that metal was really just a distillation of something that existed in all living creatures, who's to say that you couldn't apply someone directly to the pattern? That must be how the Artificer's magic was done. It explained how Crane was able to possess my father, even though dad didn't have any cogwork. Usually Artificers had to perform their tricks on carefully cogged and manipulated volunteers. To forcefully take over a creature without the assistance of cogwork implied that the pattern was being applied directly to the flesh.

  Crane must be trying to get his hands on the angel's heart. To apply it to his flesh. To become something else. But what? And more importantly, how to stop him? I didn't even know where he was. Camilla was relatively free, powered by the foetal metal provided by Crane's murder of crows, surrounded by his cog-dead Wrights, and intent on disassembling the Church of the Algorithm. What was he waiting for? Was the pattern of the heart somehow incomplete, from having been separated from Camilla for so many years? Or was he simply waiting to strike when she was distracted with other tasks?