The Waking Engine (10 page)

But Lallowë’s mother . . . The Cicatrix possessed limited patience and a fusion-powered exoskeleton. Who had advice for that?

A pain in her head interrupted her machinations. An old pain, but one that she used to feel elsewhere within her body. It stabbed through her head from temple to temple, and heralded the arrival of more than a simple message. Somewhere, worlds and universes away, a faerie queen began to send her sole remaining daughter a gift. Mother’s gifts were never pleasant.

Lallowë drained her wine and left the solarium. Her bare feet made no noise on the parquet floor of the hall, nor on the lush pile of her carpets. She tore a page of parchment from her boards—of a thick caliper, crisp and neat, neither ivory nor white but bone— and spread it across her desk with stones at the corners. The warm-toned drawing room was darker than the solarium, but faerie eyes needed no lamps.

From inside a drawer, a pouch, and handkerchief she took a draft pen loaded with a very particular ink. The sound of pen scratching parchment made her skin prickle as Lallowë etched a single line. Dark ink spilled but did not clot. In another universe, Mother pushed, and the line split into two arcs, creating space where there was none before. The parchment puckered at its sides as its weft was distorted by the dilating oval of ink. Crimson and black pigment filled the little creases in the parchment, spreading its tattoo as the spell allowed Mother to slip something through from there to here.

Birthing her way between universes; it was powerful magic, but slow. Much slower now than when Mother could still use her womb.

As she watched the vulvar portal widen, Lallowë felt reminded of the pressing need to understand her mother’s transformation from unseelie queen to mechanical nightmare, as well as her machine-derived increase in power. With her mother’s interest looming over her shoulder, Lallowë could not afford to play the game as murderously as she would have liked—she would have to find a way to subvert while appearing obedient.

Something shiny glinted from within the blood-inked passage, and Lallowë’s head cramped again. A gold oval—flatter than an egg but fatter than a pocketwatch—pushed its way through the paper, rising up from the flat surface of her desk.

Lallowë snatched it up at once, pulling it from the inked vulva. A cursory glance gave no hint to its purpose, or her mother’s reason for sending it, and it was not until she wiped the ink from its surface that Lallowë realized what she held. The bauble vibrated with energy, and Lallowë felt the whisper of magic within it. And also the prickle of electricity. This pretty little thing was a machine.

It was the machine that had turned her mother into a monster.

Sesstri was livid. Asher hadn’t worked out how his anger at Sesstri had sublimated into meekness, but somehow Sesstri managed to claim the rage that by all rights ought to have been his. He never expected her to care about Cooper; she’d seen him at the Apostery? With a Death Boy? And Cooper still had his navel?

“He didn’t die?” Asher held his head in his big gray hands and looked at Sesstri like a beaten puppy.

“No, he didn’t, and I was waiting until you returned, but you dumped him like trash, you stupid, stupid man!” She puffed hair from her face.

“Why did you wait?”

“I . . . I didn’t know . . . Horse tits, Asher, I was trying to reason it out. I didn’t think you’d toss him into a fucking ditch!”

“It wasn’t a ditch.” Asher’s stormy mood was gone. Sesstri raged against the idiocy of men and the likelihood of Terenz-de-Guises’ assassins tracking them all down and sending them spiraling off into other lives.

“We’re right back where we started, only worse,” she steamed. “Because now there is a young man who is not a turd walking around the City Unspoken, and he’s being courted by a Death Boy. Did I mention that? Cooper was drunk and holding hands with a minion of that.” She pointed north, through the bay windows, where the burning towers lit the night sky.

“Fuck me,” Asher said in despair, when an insistent knocking sounded at the door.

“You sure this is the place, kid?” asked a child’s voice from outside.

“It’s the only place I know,” said a voice that brought a brilliant smile to Asher’s face. He leapt up and threw open the door, grabbing Cooper and wrapping him in a crushingly strong bear hug.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry!” Asher shouted, twirling Cooper around, or trying to, while covering his face in kisses. “I won’t ever leave you again, my special little darling.”

“Fuck you.” Cooper pushed Asher away, but didn’t feel as angry as he knew he should. Partly because Nixon was trying to tug off Cooper’s t-shirt when he ought to have at least a moment of indignation at the great gray ape who left him to rot in the middle of this nightmare city. Nixon pulled up on the t-shirt to little effect.

“Hey, buddy, give me my shirt.” Nixon pawed at Cooper’s side. “What’s your shirt say, anyway? What’s a Danzig?”

Then, “Shit. You gotta navel, kid. What gives?” Nixon fixed Cooper with a doubtful eye, and Cooper pushed him away.

“Huh?” Cooper’s eyes were wide. “Of course I have a navel. Everybody has a navel.”

Nixon pointed at his own bare belly. There was no navel there, just smooth skin. “Jesus. Nobody has a navel, moron.” Cooper’s eyes grew even wider, saucers of shock in his round face. “Excuse me? Nobody has a fucking what?”

Asher held up his hands. “Okay, okay. Listen, Cooper, as it turns out, you didn’t exactly die.”

Before he could vomit, Sesstri stepped in. “It’s my fault. I saw it when I strip-searched you. I just . . . didn’t . . .” She wilted.

Cooper blinked rapidly. “You saw what, exactly?”

“Your navel. It’s just another scar, Cooper. And scars disappear when you die.”

“I don’t understand.” Cooper didn’t. “Why are you telling me this now?”

Sesstri skirted that question. “When your body fails, you move on. Your spirit clothes itself in its own reflection—the flesh and blood and good denim that you remember. You awake in a body that is your own, but new. The only way to tell, really, is this.” She prodded his belly and then shrugged artfully. “You only get one belly button. So you cannot have passed over. You are still on your first waking life. You are simply too young to be anything more than you seem.”

“I still don’t understand.”

Asher took a turn. “Plenty of people have navels. Anyone born here, in the city, and they’re on their first life— in their first body. Because you only get a navel by being born—you weren’t born here, you merely reincarnated here. You had no placenta, no umbilicus to feed you. You awoke, whole and new and dead.” He pointed to Nixon. “This boy has no navel because he’s died at least once already, that’s how he got here. Neither does Sesstri, and, I thought, neither did you.”

“So . . . so. I’m not dead? I’m not dead!” Cooper cheered, then realized that not-dying changed his circumstances very little. “Why am I here? How am I here?”

“I would very much like to know.” Sesstri glared at Cooper as if he knew the answer and refused to share. He glared right back, taking the opportunity to examine Sesstri more closely: tall, thin and coldly beautiful, her light brown eyes flashed with a surgical intelligence. Sesstri wore a high- necked dress of wrapped yellow silk, its stiff collar only emphasizing the length of her amber neck. Like so much here, she was breathtaking and frightening at the same time. Nixon and Sesstri had taken one look at each other and, by wordless accord, ignored each other entirely. The unboy retreated to the doorstep, listening from outside while appearing to doze.

Asher took the opportunity to needle the angry woman. “Witness, Cooper, this irradiant creature who assaults us: Sesstri Manfrix—scholar, tyrant, beauty queen.” He finished his drink.

“Cooper,” Sesstri pronounced, and it sounded like an accusation. She poked him again. “Cooper. Not a magical adept, not a Coffinstepper or other professional corpse, no advanced technology, nothing. So what are you? Why are you here?” He shrugged. “Tell me!” she commanded, her words trailing the faintest red thread of panic. WhatBringsYouHere? Her thoughts scratched a rhythm in his head. WhatRises?

“I don’t know,” Cooper said, his voice beginning to crack. This was too much. He wanted to cry. He wanted to shoot them both in the face with a fat .45.

Asher stood and put his hand on his hip. His red-rimmed eyes were kind.

“Cooper,” he said, pressing one big gray hand against Cooper’s shoulder. “You will be fine. I promise it. You will be more than fine.” And then, “I’m sorry I abandoned you and left you for dead.”

And for the first time Cooper really saw Asher: maggot skin, bloodless lips, beauty in a body bag. He was sex and dissolution and strength in a ropey slouch.

“Something is wrong with the world,” Asher rasped, and his voice was thick with a sorrow deeper and wider than Cooper would ever have guessed from his casual front. That face was a mask hiding a whole underground ocean of sorrows.

“We need worthier drinks for this part of the conversation.” Asher stalked into the kitchen. “And by worthier, I, of course, mean stronger.” He returned with a squat bottle of dusty glass in one hand, balancing three ice-filled tumblers in the other. Into each he poured a measure of acid-green liquid. “This is obsinto,” he announced. “It makes everything better.” With a little two-step flourish, he passed Cooper a drink that smelled of anise and mothballs.

“Something is wrong with all worlds,” Sesstri corrected, still musing over Asher’s pronouncement. “And nobody seems to care. We don’t know what to do, or what will happen.” With an expression of supreme relief, Sesstri closed her eyes and drained her glass in one quick motion. Then she looked at Cooper and smiled. A peregrine falcon smile, fierce but just as much a mask as Asher’s. She was sad, too, Cooper realized, and desperate as well. They were each desperate and sad, and for some reason Cooper himself was a disappointment that increased the measure of both. He asked why.

They exchanged a long glance. A loaded glance, and there was more than business and world-worry in it.

“We thought you were . . .” Asher hesitated. “You won’t understand.”

“Tell me!” Cooper commanded.

“He’ll think we’re crazy,” Asher cautioned Sesstri, who kept silent, occupied by her thoughts. WeAreWeAreWeAre.

“I already do.”

She sighed and threw up her hands in defeat. “Hardly a surprise,” she said flatly, then leaned in to Cooper with intensity. “Do you know what a shaman does?”

“We thought you were a shaman,” Asher said, rolling his eyes out of sheer helplessness. “Or an adept. A mage, a mystic. Something to help us.”

“We were looking for someone,” Sesstri corrected. “Instead we found you.”

“What do you mean, shaman?” he asked, ignoring her newest insult.

“Shaman: a core-world, practically proto-cultural totemic, whose power is usually marked by, among other things, a journey of ascent—or descent—into the lives beyond life. A guide, a protector, a seer. Primitive from a certain vantage, perhaps remedial but, under certain circumstances, quite effective. One who walks between worlds and communes with spirits.” She clicked her tongue, looking him up and down. “But you don’t look proto-cultural.”

Cooper bared his teeth.

“He looks feral enough to me,” Asher said blandly.

Sesstri shook her head and her hair rippled. Dawn silk dancing. “Look at his clothes. He’s wearing denim, Asher, not home-tanned leathers.” She leaned over Cooper, peering closely and scratching at the seam of his jeans with a lacquered nail. “I woke up in a bath towel—this is merely part of the process. As I observed earlier, the stitching is clearly mechanical and the construction and branding imply a large commercial presence. Maybe massive. Industry.” She leaned in close, her burl-wood eyes flashing. Sesstri’s intellect shone from those eyes, self-evident and intimidating. “Do the words Starsung Underwine mean anything to you?”

Cooper shook his head no.

“What about Drambassel Fivemalt?”

No again. Sesstri pouted.

It dawned on Cooper that she was listing brand names, though he didn’t know why.

“Mercedes-Benz?” she asked hopefully.

Of course. She was trying to place him. She could do that?

Cooper nodded with enthusiasm, more pleased to have been correct in his assumption than to give the woman what she wanted. His battered mind was adjusting after all.

Sesstri snapped her fingers and rounded on Asher. “This one is no shaman!” she pronounced. “I told you so. I know of his world.”

“You do?” Asher asked with a screwy face.

“So do you, you just aren’t aware you know it—it’s one of the big players. Real shamans don’t exist in postindustrial, magic-dead societies. Coreworld shamans are shadows, and their magical adepts are simply practitioners of self-delusion. It’s all drugs and drumming.”

“So what am I?” Cooper interrupted. They both looked at him like they’d forgotten he could speak.

“An erratum, I guess,” Asher muttered, averting his gaze down into his tumbler.

“I haven’t the slightest idea what you are, stranger, or why you’re here,” Sesstri said with finality. “That alone should terrify you.”

Cooper looked down into his own glass—they were all avoiding eye contact now—and swirled the grass-colored pastis to enjoy the familiar sound of ice cubes clinking. He drained it and observed that he wasn’t terrified at all. Embroiled in a plot beyond his understanding, something that stole him from his bed as he slept and dropped him here, among these improbable strangers in this impossible city—Cooper should have been horrified; he should have been a quivering mass of tears and snot. But he wasn’t horrified, not anymore. By some trick of fate or magic or inner strength, Cooper found himself merely annoyed. And careful.

“I guess I find that kind of rewarding,” he said, looking at Sesstri. She didn’t shrink from their locked gaze, and neither did he. “It may be self- defeating, it may even be suicidal, but right now? Right now I think, Sesstri, that stumping you is a beautiful thing.”

After that, she did not speak to him for quite a while.

Sleep called to Cooper like a siren. Sesstri and Asher circled each other for the better part of an hour, sniping and ignoring Cooper, who was happy to be ignored. He poured mothballs down his throat and got drunk for the second time that day, while stars circled overhead. Still, a tension had been broken. Somehow it felt as if the three of them were bound together now, in their loneliness and confusion. Cooper wondered if they were . . . it felt like they might almost be friends. And that was the least sane thing he’d observed all day.