The Waking Engine Part 13

"Yeah." Nixon nodded, chewing his lip. "Yeah . . . That doesn't always work out so good."

They chuckled together. "That's a lesson a lot of men spend many lives failing to learn."

Nixon shrugged. "Yeah, well, walk a mile, right?"

The sky looked less blue than it had a few moments ago, and Osebo reconsidered his forecast. "Nixon, what would you say to a bite of breakfast?"

The promise of food evaporated the remains of the unboy's skepticism.

"I'd say 'yes!' "

Osebo turned to the wall and put his palm flat against the bricks while he pinched one of the beads around his neck with his other hand. He twitched a mental muscle in a part of himself that no mortal could understand or possess. The air became brittle, then viscous like honey, and the Skylit Fall vanished. The troubling sky vanished. Lilies and lettuces, vanished. As vertigo overtook him, Nixon smelled bacon frying and eggs on the skillet. The expression on his face as he disappeared from the City Unspoken was a hungry smile.

The Undertow maintained near-constant contact with one another, although he didn't know if that was how they lived or simply protocol for a raiding party. He could hear their shorthand chirrups flitting across the rooftops, a birdsong patois of real-time intelligence-blocked thoroughfares, broken roofs, which ways were safe and which were not.

Cooper could hear fear, but the Death Boys and Charnel Girls whooping as they raced each other across the rooftops of the City Unspoken felt little to none, so his access was self-limited. Maybe they owed that carefree att.i.tude to the triumph of a successful mission; maybe it ran deeper than that, maybe their lich-lord masters had cauterized their ability to feel fear. Maybe they drank it like blood.

He could see Marvin's face reacting to unheard information, making subtle course corrections as they sped toward the looming towers, top floors burning bright and near enough now to compete with the deranging suns. But he picked up nothing from Marvin or the others-not even brainstem moments of widened eyes and increased heartbeats as a volley of dark-clad youths pushed off a taller building; an instant of panic as a gutter- slick rope slipped through outstretched hands. Their eyes widened and their heartbeats surely quickened, but he could hear nothing.

Cooper followed Marvin's effortless landing, touching pavement and ducking immediately into a roll that dispersed their momentum-Cooper realized these acrobatics were not his own, but an extension of the groupcompetence the Undertow seemed to possess. He also knew he should be concerned, that there was something or somethings he was forgetting to worry about, but each time his mind grasped for thoughts about Sesstri, Asher, or his own increasingly dire predicament, Marvin would squeeze his hand or press his body close, and Cooper knew only l.u.s.t and an insatiable hunger for adventure, for freedom.

One of the huge chains that embroidered the city emerged from the pavement at an angle, and Marvin ran up it like a ramp. Cooper slipped on the corroded metal and stumbled, grabbing Marvin's hand for support. His outstretched hand reminded Cooper of Nixon and his surly a.s.sistance, and for a moment he wondered what happened to the cantankerous urchin, or if he'd ever scored a s.h.i.+rt that fit him.

"This is dangerous," Cooper said numbly as Marvin lifted him to his feet. What did he mean, dangerous-did he mean the skylarking? Being with Marvin, heading to whatever fate awaited him? Or did he mean the whole city? The words had come out before Cooper could process them-so much of himself was muted now, still tingling with the hallucinatory aftereffects of the queen of the Nile and the adrenaline of running with the Undertow.

Marvin scoffed. "We live above, with the real danger." He hummed, pointing a finger to the sky. Cooper followed, and saw torchlight flickering at the topmost flights of the ruined skysc.r.a.pers. Dark clouds circled perpetually overhead, the contrails of the lich-lords and their court in the sky. There, like snow above tree line, the Death Boys and Charnel Girls sang to their lich-lovers, the ice- skinned masters Cooper half-dreaded, half-hungered to see. Everything here wors.h.i.+ps death, Cooper thought as he leapt from the chain to another rooftop, Marvin's hand in his, and death comes in more colors than you could ever imagine. The alley beneath them looked like a brown-gray line.

Cooper! The woman's voice had stopped crying, and started screaming his name. She was terrified, and she was alone, and she was up there. Every time he heard her voice it was like all the bells in the city ringing at once inside his skull, and between her call and the pull of l.u.s.t toward Marvin, Cooper did not know who-or what-was responsible for his decisions.

"We live above," Marvin repeated. "So we can catch their tails and fly." Catch whose tails? Cooper thought. He knew that the Undertow served some kind of undead masters, but little more. He s.h.i.+vered, but followed. As they neared the towers, Cooper saw the buildings more clearly and noted that they shared the same apocalyptic diversity as the rest of the city: Here was a skysc.r.a.per that could have been ripped from Times Square, all mirrored gla.s.s and right angles, its lower reaches barnacled with darkened signs that might have once enjoyed electricity. There, a spire like a narwhal's tooth-horn, spiral bone rising straight but perforated like a flute at its upper levels, where the wind played a lonely tune. Some were built of stone bricks and some seemingly hewn in one piece from a mountainside, some of clear or colored crystal, another that resembled a thick stem, with door- sized stoma pulsing above bristling fronds. There seemed to be no pattern to which spires remained whole and which blazed but were not consumed by fire. He saw black shapes skittering across even the burning towers-he could add fire to the list of things that the Undertow did not fear.

Cooooperrrr!

"Who built these towers?" he asked Marvin, not really expecting a response, but needing to drown out the voice.

"We don't know. They aren't as old as the Dome or even the Apostery, but they were here long before we were. Hestor, our leader, says that they were stolen from their worlds by a tyrant who wanted a forest of towers. Dorian says that's bunk, but n.o.body believes Dorian."

Cooper agreed with the latter a.s.sessment, although he didn't say so- one felt the presence of age here in a way that made Rome look like Levittown. The idea that this city might once have been different was carved into his mind like a rune, and Cooper pictured the beauty that must once have reigned, and the intervening eons scribbled over that first landscape in a palimpsest of ruin: a primeval jungle; a city of light built by cousins to G.o.ds; a forest of towers; a hermetic Dome and a poisonous sky. Was everything a perversion of something greater, older? Was nothing hallowed? Not here, not anymore. Nothing could be held sacred in the City Unspoken but Death and freedom, if any difference existed between the two.

Marvin climbed a wall and stood atop it in triumph, smiling down at Cooper, who lifted his arms.

"Help me up."

"Help yourself, Cooper." Others streamed past them, swinging and jumping onto the exposed I-beams of the skeletal tower that rose before them, a skinless monolith. He caught some faces staring down at him as they flashed overhead, hair streaking behind them, brilliant smiles exposing lips marked with the serpent and coin tattoo. A Charnel Girl with plaited white-blond hair sailed past and landed in a crouch next to Marvin atop the wall.

"Tasty." She leered down at Cooper before Marvin spun in place, knocking her backward over the wall with a brutal swipe of his forearm.

"And mine," he agreed to the place where she'd been standing. "Now follow, Cooper!"

His c.o.c.k and his conscience drove him on, toward the burning towers, toward the woman whose fear begged him to save her. Cooper only hoped he wasn't dooming himself in the process.

Sesstri kept quiet as she attempted to restore some semblance of habitability to her blown-out living room. Gla.s.s scattered and blood smeared everywhere painted her house in shades of destruction, but Sesstri only paid half a mind to the disorder. Her decision to go tromping off to Bonseki-sai hadn't been a decision at all-but rather a summons. She scolded herself for answering that summons as she threw her weight behind her overturned sofa and, grunting, righted it.

Infuriating. The woman was millions, billions of years old, and yet she couldn't hold a simple conversation. When Alouette had first found Sesstri, when the redhead brought her to this house and gave her shelter, Sesstri had thought her a benevolent loon, perhaps indicative of the addlepated citizenry of the City Unspoken-which, after all, did love its madmen. Now, she realized the convolution of manipulation, otherness, and fragmentation that characterized Chesmarul's manifestation in "human context." A ridiculous term, but seemingly apt. As Alouette, Chesmarul was at once both a superior being and an inferior one. Working as both a physically embodied being and a world-spanning supermind, Chesmarul partnered with herself to cajole Sesstri into place, monitor the collapse of City Unspoken and the breakdown of True Death, summon Cooper for unconvincing reasons, hire Nixon, and bind them all together to endure who-knows-what-else. What a partners.h.i.+p-what an infuriation.

Chesmarul's manifestation seemed like a personal attack against Sesstri. There was nothing human about Chesmarul, nothing to which Sesstri could relate by anything so naively simple as an extrapolation of scale. Despite what she said, the red ribbon was nothing like a woman.

Were all the First People so unreachable to mortals? The question seemed trivial, but it writhed in Sesstri's gut like a worm in hot ashes. She ma.s.saged the divot between her furrowed brows and missed the simple days when all she'd needed to worry about was a filicidal father and a world that wouldn't let anything with a c.l.i.toris read books.

Sesstri picked up cus.h.i.+ons and tested them for intactness, returned them to the sofa, and tried to address the broken windows. "f.u.c.king knife tears in my curtains." She pulled together the remnants of her window treatment. "At least they're from my knives. Idiots."

The City Unspoken sheltered many beings that others called "G.o.ds"; the people of this city were atheist to their bones, which made it a wonderful hidey-hole for all manner of First People who could live here relatively unmolested, without attracting wors.h.i.+p or excessive regard. The citizens of the City Unspoken treated every being the same: as chattel, corpse, or customer. The bells tolled for everyone, and only coin counted.

They tolled now, pealing through the shattered windows with the breeze. Soothing and maddening her. Sesstri hoped Cooper was safe, wherever he'd been taken. But she knew who to blame now, besides herself, which was something.

Sesstri ran her fingers through her hair, letting it fall over her face in a veil of pink. When she was a child, she had hid behind her hair like that, hoping to make herself invisible from her father and the cadre of armed men who always surrounded him. Like a peek- a-boo who never peeked, Sesstri would throw her pink hair over her face and pretend she was somewhere he could not see her. Somewhere safe, where a mother who still lived cared for Sesstri as a parent ought. She'd been told her mother died in childbirth, though she knew that to be a lie. Her father always blinked when he lied.

She didn't see the shadow fall across her doorstep, nor see Asher wilt against the doorframe. She didn't hear his ragged breath catch when he saw her hips and b.r.e.a.s.t.s silhouetted by the late morning sun. Asher stared at her out of the corner of his eye, half-afraid to be caught admiring the view and wholly afraid that the view might take herself away.

"Miss me?" he dared ask her.

Sesstri gave a start, shook her hair from her face, and glared in the direction of the voice she recognized so instantly and with such a rush of blood that it shamed her.

"A careful man would know better than to surprise me," Sesstri answered as her eyes focused on the man who so bedeviled her, "unless he loves a knife fight." She summoned all her frustration and a.s.sembled it into armor that protected her like a plated knight, but what she thought was: Yes, yes, oh yes.

"Your morning as dismal as mine?" Asher loped into the room and coiled himself into an armchair near Sesstri, swiping broken china off the leather onto the floor. He tried not to wince as his torn body relaxed at last, then reached up and took her hand; she let him.

Sesstri pushed away thoughts of pillows and big gray hands and lips that did more than repress smiles; that he made her want to smile was a sacrilege she allowed, but inadmissibly.

"Oh, it was plenty dismal." Her gaze remained fixed on the view of the city through the window. Terraced hills and bell towers, wheeling flocks of birds, the twins of yellow fire that posed as today's suns. She would not think about the heat of his hand holding her own, and she would not let him warm her.

"Tell me about it, please?" He stroked his long nose with a finger, a statue admiring its own profile.

Sesstri let out the breath she'd been holding. "One of the First People has been with me all along."

A queer look pa.s.sed over Asher's face. "Oh?"

"Chesmarul, the red ribbon-you know of her?" He nodded and smiled. Smiled, of all things. "She exploded behind the great tree in Bonseki-sai and turned into my f.u.c.king landlady." Sesstri sulked.

Asher absorbed the news with a kind of elan, and flashed a smile that disarmed her. "You mustn't blame yourself, my th.o.r.n.y briar rose. Even the most brilliant of the Third People, which you are, can be hoodwinked by the least of the First People. And Chesmarul, she is not the least-she is one of the eldest." He pulled her hand toward him, so gently, and moved his lips to touch the back of it. Not a kiss, just lips and skin; she could not hate that.

She did not hate it, but she withdrew her hand anyway. "She claims to have summoned Cooper, Asher."

"Good-question answered. Sesstri." Asher looked up at her through snowy lashes. "Listen to me. I am ancient and wise, bound to be right upon occasion, and I say not to punish yourself."

"Horse guts." She yielded to her desires and poured herself a finger of obsinto.

"Could this be a manifestation of guilt left over from your deception regarding Cooper's navel?" Sesstri ignored him, and he chuckled under his breath.

Green liquor cooled and burned her throat. Better. But not another drop. When Sesstri set down her gla.s.s it was a gavel, and she heard the judgment. Her mouth formed a perfect O, and Asher found himself longing to match it with his own. "Braided t.i.ts of the Horse mother, I've ruined everything, haven't I? I kept Cooper's navel from you, I-I-How did I miss this, and how did I behave so perfectly wrongly?"

Asher steepled his fingers and hid behind them. "Because you are perfect, even in disgrace?"

"I lied to you about Cooper and then I accosted him at the Apostery and probably drove him into the arms of some Death Boy gigolo! No wonder the Death Boy kept attacking me, I interfered in a perfect little hunt. The f.u.c.king Undertow saw Cooper more clearly than I did!" She picked at the rattan arm of her chair. "Oh Asher, I am everything I promised myself that I was not."

"Death Boy?" Asher sat up with a start, wincing at the wounds he'd ignored since La Jocondette. "What do you mean, Death Boy? You got attacked by a Death Boy too?"

But Sesstri no longer heard him. She'd retreated to memories of her stepmother, a simpering creature who reminded her strongly of Alouette. Always growing things, always nurturing something back to health, or into a better blossom. As a child, Sesstri had fantasized about what her real mother looked like, how she acted-surely she would be a vase of ice water to her stepmother's carafe of warm milk; steel to her wool.

Sesstri's real mother would be an inhuman queen of lace and blades, that was how Sesstri imagined her. The only idea she had of her mother was an impossible vision of a woman who'd equaled her father, and the only clue had been her father's rare remembrance of the vanished wife who'd surprised him by embodying all he'd been taught a woman could not be: strong, cruel, tactically brilliant. It was this last quality that had inspired Sesstri, driven her to outdo her father's battlefield successes in the scholastic arena. And how she had! The first woman to earn an Optimae degree in over three hundred years, and the youngest of any gender to do so by half a de cade. She'd left opponents as bereft of life on the debating floor as her father ever did in the theater of war. She'd been an unstoppable force, a scalpel performing surgery on her world until it fit like a glove.

And then she'd been raped to death in the high pa.s.ses.

"Sesstri, are you listening to me? It's important." Asher poured a measure of green liquor into her gla.s.s and drained it himself. He began to pull at his s.h.i.+rt, tenderly. "Tell me about this Undertow business."

In the pa.s.ses, Sesstri had felt so close to the sky that the mountaintops seemed to sc.r.a.pe at the firmament like teeth. And there atop the world she had bled out like a stuck pig, unable to remove the polearm that impaled her gut or push away the corpse of the man who'd been foolish enough not to kill her quickly, and from behind. He'd earned his own death that day, atop the untrammeled mountains, raped to death himself by Sesstri's dagger in his belly. In his manhood. She'd been able to do nothing else but stab at him, pinned and impaled as she'd been-just the one arm free, and only enough strength left in it to hack her murderer again and again and again until, at last, her first face stared unblinking into the heart of the sun.

When death had been simple, when it spelled the end of her everything, Sesstri's goals had been simple as well: accomplish as much as possible before the lights went out.

Now she had two deaths under her belt and she felt more afraid of dying than she'd ever felt at home. Now she knew death was not the end, but it was an end-and here it would spell an end to her involvement with this city, this problem, this insufferable gray b.a.s.t.a.r.d. Now death meant moving on with nothing but her memory of unfinished business- leaving behind all of her work, her notes and journals, the prized primary sources she'd worked so hard to reach. It meant leaving behind all of that, and Asher.

She was scared to death to leave.

How her stepmother must be laughing, wherever she was, at the irony. Scared to die, scared to leave a man. Her lessons on being human had taken root at last. How could Sesstri bend and retain herself? And wasn't that a convenient orthodoxy, to secure her ident.i.ty in an alpine solitude that didn't challenge or frighten her. Either way, I'm weak.

Asher groaned, and Sesstri pulled herself out of her ruminations to see him shrugging off his s.h.i.+rt. His body was covered in bruises, deep gunmetal clouds of clotted blood beneath his skin; he winced and tried not to make any noise as he tugged away his clothing, but she could read the pain in his face. It hurt to watch.

Asher looked up at her with a half smile and held up a handful of rolled linen strips. Had he been saying something? "If you aren't going to tell me what you've done, could you at least help me with these bandages?"

Then she noticed the older wounds on his torso and gasped despite herself.

"What happened to you?" She pushed the bandages away and inspected Asher's scarred body.

"I . . . I fought, and then I did something, and it . . ." He hid a grimace behind his hands. The pattern of the wounds was so deliberate that Sesstri almost dismissed the scars as some kind of ugly tattoo; between each of his ribs on either side of his chest puckered a scar, like the javelin wounds she'd seen on tourney stallions-a round piercing hole, not torn or sliced, but punctured. And they were bleeding afresh. They lined his sides at regular intervals, one beneath each rib, and blood as white as fresh cream oozed from their mouths. White blood . . .

"Asher, who did this to you?" Sesstri surprised herself with the concern in her voice.

"I can't tell you." He looked down.

"Of course you can!" The words snapped out of her mouth like a whip, all reflex and no reflection. Then, a wonder-Sesstri Manfrix backed down from an unanswered question. "That is . . . if you . . ." She nodded. "I understand."

I most certainly do not understand.

He gawped at her, so disarming in his sudden sincerity, bandage in his hand. "Huh. We must be in trouble."

She bent to inspect the wounds. His skin even healed in grayscale; the scars were charcoal holes, with darker new skin covering them-but each and every one had been reopened, and today. The white blood surprised Sesstri, but men had undergone weirder modifications in the near-endless dance of lives. Of course they had.

"Do those hurt?" She pointed at the older, reopened wounds. They reminded her of the sockets of eyeless beggars, wimpled and hollow.

"Only when . . ." he began, but stopped himself. "Sometimes."

She sat next to him on the sofa, not touching. Just close.

"I know what you feel . . ." Sesstri began, but Asher leveled her with a flat look and she trailed off, shaking her head. "That is, I know what those kind of injuries feel like. Piercing wounds, I mean." She stalled, and swept her lap clean with her uninjured hand. ". . . I don't know what I mean."

He brushed his hair back from his forehead; dovecote wings hid a marble face. What he saw when he looked at her face was a mystery to Sesstri, and she felt a different kind of thrill at the prospect of learning what that might be. A thrill and a needle of fear-what could Asher read in her face that was not all cold angles and icicle stares? She'd never wanted to be that sort of person before.

"Then I'm sorry, if you do. You shouldn't have to know some things." He looked away, at his feet, at the h.o.r.n.y old Victrola.

Sesstri found herself agreeing. "I suppose under normal circ.u.mstances I'd lecture you about the value of knowledge in the face of even the most painful reality, but on this point, Asher, I'm inclined to agree with you. Some lessons are best delayed as long as possible." She put a hand on her belly, then took it away.

He nodded, afraid to smile. "I suppose that's the closest you can come to saying the lesson shouldn't be learned at all, isn't it?"

She smiled. "I would never say that, Asher, not even if by some major miracle I happened to believe it." She blinked at the lie, just like her father.

". . . On principle," he said.

"On principle."

Outside the windows, locked in perpetual moonrise, the Dome glowered an angry green-gold, and flames that burned but did not consume licked the horizon. "I understand your militancy more than you might think." He made it a suggestion, not an imposition. He danced around her amazing mind and shrunken heart, and it felt like flying.

The scream of shattering gla.s.s reverberated through the room, causing all three girls to look up as one and set aside their embroidery hoops. The manservant who'd tripped and dashed the lunch-laden tray against the wall blushed and disappeared, while a brigade of additional servants rushed in to rescue the parquet and wainscoting from the ravages of broken cups and spilled cherry liquor.

NoNo and NiNi Leibowitz opened and closed their eyes lazily, slow- blinking lizards in canary tulle and burgundy batik, respectively. NoNo palmed a lacey sunshade and NiNi wore a c.o.c.keyed hat that obscured half of her face from view, but despite the fact that the twins had come late to her breakfast tea, Bitzy had decided there wasn't much to miss on that score. In fact, Bitzy had decided a number of things: firstly, that Purity Kloo had been allowed to exercise far too much free will than was appropriate for a young lady of her station, and secondly that an increase in the frequency of the murders in their little crusade against chaos would do them all a world of good and teach Purity to mind herself besides.

"Doesn't anybody know where Purity ran off to?" Bitzy asked by way of ignoring the embarra.s.sing clumsiness of the servants in the corner.

NoNo and NiNi shrugged. NiNi nibbled a coldc.u.mbre sandwich triangle and observed: "I don't think she runs."

Bitzy inhaled. "That isn't at all what I meant, NiNi dear."

To her credit, NoNo managed to sound slightly less vapid. "Maybe she's just . . . like . . . taking a nap."

"We did not see Purity." NiNi shook her head in accord. Bitzy thought her eyes might be closed, but she couldn't quite see. Stupid sideways hats would be the next to go. "Especially we did not see Purity watching the sunrise in the Pet.i.te-"

NoNo jabbed her sister in the foot with the point of her sunshade. NiNi stopped speaking, trailing off in midsentence. The twins blinked as one.

"I'd like a nap." NoNo rested her head on the grip of her folded sunshade. "Dance cla.s.ses are so tiring."

"Maybe she's killing herself again?" NiNi tried to be helpful.

Bitzy dismissed the twins from her attention. She'd been ruminating over Purity since yesterday, when they'd dismembered the Eightsguard girl. It wasn't that Bitzy felt guilty, exactly, but she couldn't help feel- silly as it was even to suggest-somehow judged by Purity. It was nothing of any importance, of course; Bitzy felt confident that the dead girl's name wouldn't even come up at the next meal her family took with the Eightsguards. It wasn't like they'd scattered Rawella's remains or anything pernicious, the stupid thing was probably already alive again and hiding in her rooms, as she ought to. The lords of the Circle Unsung were fussily tightlipped about everything since the advent of their fun new secret toy, and had no time for the squabblings of girls, not even her own darling father.

But it wasn't the lords or their secrets that occupied the thoughts of Bitzy Bratislaus as a meager morning filtered in through the thick gla.s.s section of Dome wall that hugged the parlor. It was the look she'd seen on Purity's face as they chopped up the Eightsguard girl that Bitzy couldn't get out of her head. It hadn't been the bland half-interest of the Leibowitz twins, nor the lick of thrilled heat between the thighs that Bitzy herself felt when enforcing order. It wasn't even something as louche as demented murderous glee, which could at least be excused given the restrictions of their confinement. No, Bitzy had seen something else in Purity's eyes just for a moment, and she hadn't liked it, not one little bit. She'd seen distaste.

Bitzy steeled herself against resentment. Purity had every right to be unamused by the enactment of justice-and reluctance would have been forgivable, perhaps even appropriate in the hopelessly outmoded way of thinking that Bitzy sometimes worried Purity embodied. But the fleeting expression of distaste she'd seen on Purity's face discomfited her enormously. It seemed to suggest-however ridiculously-that Bitzy had engaged the girls in an activity that was less than the apex of fas.h.i.+on. That she might somehow have been wrong about taste.

The idea was absurd. Style meant everything, and Bitzy epitomized style. This was established fact. Who else could popularize culottes beneath short skirts, or beanies colored according to each woman's birthstone? n.o.body at all, that's who. And h.e.l.l-bent for butchery was anyone who suggested-who even implied-otherwise. Bitzy Bratislaus was a pioneer, a savior of her people in these dark times of limited recreation.