Heart of Veridon (19 page)

Tomb was quiet. Eventually, “You wouldn’t understand.”

“Now that,” I said, leaning in toward the massive face. “That I believe.”

“It is here.”

“What?”

“Your artifact. Third shelf, against the wall. An ivory box. They made it into something holy, those churchmen. I don’t know where the key is hidden.”

I stood up. Wilson was already up the pit, rummaging in the area Tomb had indicated. “Why tell me? If it has been hidden all this time. What would Angela say?”

“Angela has gone a great deal farther than I think is prudent. And I am tired. Now, go.”

He settled down, the face shifting ever so slightly into slack inattention. I bounded up the stairs. When I looked back the face was still open, the glossy green eyes staring up at the darkness with their pupils of bloated flesh.

Wilson brought me the box. We squatted in the walkway. It was a long, narrow container, the flat planes thin sheets of ivory set in tarnished silver fittings. It was a simple matter to crack open with my knife. The artifact clattered out. I squatted above it, looking for damage. It was quiet in the hallways.

The artifact was a cylinder of steel with grooves. Something twitched inside me, like a stolen memory burning through my head. Without thinking I ran my hand down the artifact, triggered some hidden catch, then balanced it on one end. The cylinder blossomed, like a flower.

There was wire, a fly wheel, and a tightly packed central axis of stacked metal segments. It spun up. Plates folded out from the central core, supported and guided by the wires, which stiffened as they expanded. The plates spun in wider circles, shifting, sliding by each other until they blurred into a single brilliant image. Viewed from above it made a picture, like a cinescope.

It was a map. Most of it looked like nothing to me, just lines and rivers and a coastline, far in the top left corner. And then I saw Veridon, or where Veridon should have been, near one edge of the map, in the arms of the Ebd and the Dunje. From there I found the Reine, the Breaking Wall, the Cusp Sea, the Tavis Minor and Major, the Salt Sweeps. It was different than the map I knew, the one I learned at the Academy, but some of the landmarks were similar enough. I followed the Reine where it left the Cusp, far beyond the borders of the Academy’s maps.

There was a city, massive, if the scale was to be believed. It was at the center of the map, sprawled on both sides of the Reine hundreds of miles downriver from the Cusp. So far beyond the ken of the Academy’s far ranging Expeditioner’s Corp I could only stare in amazement. I felt like there was someone over my shoulder, a presence both ancient and young, a presence that stank of fear and isolation. I looked at that city and the phantom in me spoke with my voice.

“Home,” we said.

“W
ELL NOW,
” W
ILSON
muttered. “Well, well. Now isn’t that interesting.” He hooked an arm under my shoulder and dragged me to my feet. I realized I had been lying down. He propped me against a shelf, littered with the parts of a shattered clock.

“We need to get out of here,” I said. My throat felt like it was lined in barbed wire.

“Be a hell of a time,” Wilson said. “Lots of folks out there. And I don’t think Angela’s going to like us walking out with that thing.”

“Yeah.” I tested my legs, found I could stand. “Well, maybe there’s another way out of here.”

Patron Tomb shuffled, his eyelids cracking just slightly. “There is.”

“You can get us out?” Wilson asked.

“No. But I can show you the way.” He paused, his eyelids flaring wider in surprise. “There is something upstairs, a presence. It has found the hallway.”

“What?” I asked.

“Something… brilliant. What is this thing?” Tomb’s voice was low, in awe.

“The angel,” Wilson whispered. “We need to get the hell out.”

“Yes, you do. My gods, you do. He’s at the door.”

The door at the top of the stairs clanged. Dust settled from the roof in wide sheets. The clanging continued, steady, metronomic.

“This is going to be interesting,” Tomb said. “I should thank you, Burn. It’s a good day you’ve brought me.”

“It will try to kill you,” I said.

“Perhaps. Here,” machines cycled, and a narrow door opened in the wall opposite the main entrance. “That leads to a covered canal near the Bellingrow. It’s quite a trek, I’m told. In case they ever need to get me out.”

“You would never fit through that door.”

“Desperation and technology can do amazing things,” he said. “Now, hurry. He’s persistent.”

We rushed out the door. I paused to look back. The old man’s bloated eyes were settled on the other door, watching the angel break his slow way in, like the tide battering a rocky coast. The door closed behind us.

I
DON’T REMEMBER
much after that. The darkness faded into gray, tunnels of brick and dirt that stretched for an eternity and when I came to I was lying on a hard stone floor, Wilson looking down at me.

“You’re trying to show me wrong, son,” Wilson said quietly. His face was bent very close to mine, so I could smell his breath. It smelled like ground up flies and specimen jars. “Trying to die, aren’t you?”

“Far from it.” My voice was a whisper. “Just other folks, testing the theory.”

“Well. More luck than science, this time.” He picked up a tin cup and rattled it around. There was a deformed slug at the bottom, shiny with blood. “Frail gun she shot you with. More ornament than weapon, I suspect.”

“She who?” It was Emily talking, somewhere. I couldn’t see where exactly, but it sounded like she was standing near my head, looking down. Behind me a little. I twisted and saw her face, grimacing down at me.

“Tomb. Little Lady Tomb.”

“Bullshit,” she said.

“Fine, Em. Whatever. It was the Blessed Celeste. But she looked a hell of a lot like the Lady Tomb.”

“It was her alright,” Wilson said. He grinned tightly up at Emily. “Pretty as you please, nice to meet you, and here’s a bullet for your time.”

“What dumbass thing did you do to get her to shoot you, Jacob? Did you break into her house? Steal some silverware?”

I tried to answer, but it came out as a dry rattling cough. Wilson put his hand on my chest until it settled down. When I could talk again, even I had trouble hearing me. Emily bent down close. She smelled like sweat and dry flowers.

“Badge broke into her house. Stormed the place. We were running, got cornered.” I paused to spit, but came up empty. My tongue felt like a strap of leather. “She said some shit about not letting them get a hold of me. Then she put a bullet in my chest.”

“Hm,” Emily said. She stood up and walked out of my field of vision. Wilson watched her go, then looked back at me. His eyes were carefully neutral.

“How’d you get out?” she asked.

I started to answer, but Wilson shushed me.

“We lost her and found a back door. Things were very…” he paused, nodding to himself. “Very confusing. For everyone, I think.”

“Lost her? You didn’t kill her, did you?”

I shook my head. “Angel’s back,” I said.

Emily raised her eyebrows. “That’s sudden. Thought you said you’d killed it?”

“I killed something. But it was the same guy.”

“I’ve been meaning to ask you about that,” Wilson said, washing off his hands in a puddle of rain water. “I have some thoughts.”

“Are they warm, happy thoughts?” I asked. “Thoughts that are likely to reassure me as to our own safety?”

“Not completely,” he said. “But they may shed some light on what we’re dealing with here.”

“Then keep them to yourself.” I stretched out on the floor and laced my fingers behind my neck. “I’m limiting myself to good news for a little while.”

“Let’s hear it, Wilson,” Emily said, shooting me a cross look.

“Ever since you talked about killing the Summer Girl, I’ve been churning away at what could have happened there. What happened, exactly, to bring about that specific transformation.”

“I hit her with a hammer,” I said.

“Not… gods, you’re horrible. Not that transformation. The one where this little girl turns into a murdering angel.”

“Ah. Continue.”

“Well, the way that the Summer Girl works, the way all engram singers work, is the maker beetles. That and the queen fetus. The Artificers burn a pattern into the queen, the queen takes up residence in the singer’s internal machinery, and then the beetles burrow their way—”

“What?” Emily almost shrieked. “They burrow into her body?”

“You’ve never seen an engram singer?” I asked.

“No, you filthy noble pig. I grew up watching normal people sing normal songs, that they had memorized or made up or something.”

“Oh, right. I keep forgetting I was born so much better than you.”

“Listen, you little fucking—”

“Okay!” Wilson interjected. “Okay. So the beetles burrow in,” he turned to Emily, “through her machine. There are little tunnels that run through her body. Most of the transformation is facilitated by the machine, but it’s the beetles that do it. The machine is kind of like… like a hive, I suppose. Okay?”

“It’s still weird.”

“The point is, there’s a pattern, held by the queen. Sound familiar?”

“Cogwork,” I said. I suppose I had always known the two practices were similar, I had just never thought about how they were almost identical. “The Wrights have you memorize a pattern, they inject the foetal metal, and the metal makes itself into whatever the pattern dictates.”

“More or less,” Wilson said. “The pattern is also inscribed onto a coin and put in with the foetus. But without the pattern, the foetal metal is nothing. Just hot metal.”

“Where do the patterns come from?” Emily asked.

“The Church,” I answered. “And where do they get them? Who knows. But it’s the foundation of their religion.”

“So the Artificers and the Church, they both make their technology the same way?”

“Let’s make no mistakes, Emily.” Wilson sat up straight. “The Wrights only have what they’ve found. Their holy vessels come down the river, and the Wrights catch them and scrounge out any mysteries they can manage. They’re very good at it, and very good at applying what they find, but it’s not creation, really. More like scavenging.”

“And the Artificers?” I asked. I’d never met anyone willing to talk about the Artificers and their technology. Ever since their Guild had been unofficially disbanded and their role in the city gutted so many years ago, their methods were not a matter of public discourse. If they hadn’t been allowed to continue the minor entertainments like the Summer Girl, most folks wouldn’t even know the Guild had ever existed.

“The Artificers? Oh, well. They do things differently. Let’s leave it at that,” Wilson said. “The point is, there’s a pattern involved. Every piece of cogwork, from the zepliners to the simplest abacist, has at its heart a holy pattern of the Wrights. Including your PilotEngine, Jacob.”

“Yeah, well. Maybe they fucked mine up.”

“Maybe. That’s why I keep trying to get a good read off you, with the beetles. Trying to see the pattern of your heart.”

“Anyway. The Angel?”

“Yes, the Angel. You’re sure it was the same one?”

“Sure as hell,” I said.

“But you killed that one, or one very much like it, yes? On the Heights?”

“Right.”

“And that one, the one you killed on the Heights, the one we saw at the Manor Tomb just today, it’s the same one you saw on the
Glory
.”

“He jumped off, just before we crashed.”

Wilson stood up and, hunching over, began to pace the room. “Jumped off. Just before you crashed. And Jacob, you found this other fellow, this marine, in the Artificer’s rooms?”

“Wellons. Yeah, but he’d been dead for a while.”

“Do you think the Summer Girl was on the
Glory
?” he asked.

“No, of course not.”

“Of course not. Do you think Wellons was?”

“I didn’t…” I stopped. “You’re saying the Angel was Wellons?”

“At one point. And then, for whatever reason, it left Wellons and became the Summer Girl.”

“What? How?” Emily asked.

“I don’t have an answer for how.” Wilson stopped pacing and pulled the Cog from his pocket. “But I have an idea about why.”

He set the Cog on the ground near my feet, then crouched over his bag and produced a glass jar that jingled as he moved it. He unscrewed the lid and rummaged through the contents, then set what looked like a coin on the ground next to the Cog.

“What do you see?” he asked.

I sat up. Emily and I leaned closer to the two objects. The Cog I knew. The coin was a flat metal disk, dull, with lines etched into its surface and cog-teeth along a quarter of its perimeter. It looked old.

“Algorithm,” I said, pointing to the coin. “That’s one of the Church’s pattern-coins.”