The Waking Engine (12 page)

Purity Kloo, Elisabetta Bratislaus, and NiNi and NoNo Leibowitz sat in a solar parlor, embroidering hoods of pale blue silk. The Leibowitz twins were arguing over the finer points of millinery, with NiNi insisting that the confections of human hair crafted by one of their co-captives within the Dome didn’t count, and NoNo demanding the group acknowledge that the selfsame creations were hats, not wigs, and should be respected as such.

Purity might have mentioned that hats and wigs would both be found within a milliner’s shop, but she hadn’t the stomach for argument today.

A curved hull of translucent green Dome glass ran the length of the parlor and filtered the sunlight through its pastel sieve, but Miss Bratislaus—Bitzy, to distinguish her from the other Elisabetta of her line— had ordered warm-toned lamps set in strategic locations about the salon. Unlike Purity, Bitzy didn’t especially mind life within the Dome, except perhaps for the coolness of the light through the glass, which did little to flatter her complexion.

Purity Kloo, on the other hand, positively glowed in the curved hallways of their palace-prison, aquamarine and pear-colored light falling across her wispy blond hair and petite features as if she was born to this royal captivity. Which of course she was—they all were.

And if that captivity had grown more literal in recent years, it didn’t change the fundamentals of life in their society, only tightened the rules. It tightened the rules like a noose.

Outside the glass, the city burned and consumed itself. Purity could watch, but never help.

Bitzy Bratislaus rarely looked through the glass. She cleared her throat into a sateen kerchief and stared at the palm- sized miniature paintings that decorated the interior wall of her favorite salon. They’d been arrayed into clusters that faced the Dome wall like little phalanxes of gloved ladies, begonias, and overstuffed lapdogs, all glaring at the curved glass that imprisoned their mistress. Every noble family held token residences within the massive royal complex, a city unto itself, but until Prince Fflaen had proclaimed the Writ of Community, few had ever bothered to use them.

Now the Dome apartments were country home, city house, and piedà-terre in one, and the families’ proximity to one another had heightened tensions that in bygone days would have been ignored or left to the lesser cousins to squabble over in canalside duels. Duels rendered utterly pointless by the body-bindings placed on every member of the peerage at birth or elevation. NoNo once told Bitzy that when the Writ had first been proclaimed, Purity Kloo had attempted escape by killing herself every hour for a solid week in an attempt to weaken the enchantment that bound her spirit to her body. All she’d gotten for her efforts was a traumatized chambermaid and a scarcity of unspoiled nightgowns.

If only Purity’s suicide binge had been the least disturbing event since the Writ and the subsequent confinement of the peerage. If only their mothers and fathers who sat on the Circle Unsung had not discovered the Weapon; it was a fact that Death could come only to the Dying—the very old or very weary who matched the criteria of some existential equation. Or, it had been a fact, before the Circle found the Weapon: some tool or knowledge that let them inflict True Death upon anyone they chose. And they had chosen with abandon—twice now, the Circle had battled, and twice its ranks had been devastated. Wherever Fflaen had hid himself, the prince must be apoplectic that the aristocrats he was trying to protect had defiled the sacred trust that was his duty to safeguard. Iriit. Whoever would have guessed that True Death would become a tool of the Lords and Ladies Unsung? It was a measure of their desperation that they indulged in such tourist attractions. To the nobility, the City Unspoken was a playground, not a destination.

Bitzy cleared her throat again, attempting to wrestle her thoughts from the maudlin and into the warm light of her carefully arranged lamps.

“I saw quite the spectacle today,” she teased. Her three companions looked up with earnest expressions. She continued, “We broke our fast with Duke Eightsguard and his family this morning, as has become something of a fortnightly tradition, despite the fact that Daddy has to walk twice as far to reach his offices in the Petite Malaison.” Bitzy paused, posing; she never passed up an opportunity to mention her father, the Lord Senator. She smiled, baring perfect white teeth. “Well . . . Rawella Eightsguard wore a lilac pericoat to the table.”

“Lilac, you say?” NiNi picked up a pink sugar cube and licked it, catlike.

“Lilac. A charming confection of pucebone lace. You might have recognized it.”

“Oh?” NoNo sounded bored.

“Yes.” Bitzy nodded. “From the Princeday Eve Day Bruncheon, just four days ago.”

Purity Kloo raised an eyebrow, sensing where Bitzy was steering the conversation. “Not . . . not Princeday Eve Day Bruncheon, surely?” Purity laughed, a nervous titter that did little to dispel her anxiety. NiNi and NoNo leaned forward with their twinned nostrils flared, scenting blood in water. NiNi wore a mean little smile.

“The very same.” Bitzy bit her lips in mock sympathy.

“Oh my,” gasped NiNi without a hint of surprise.

“What a pity.” NoNo echoed her sister’s disingenuousness.

“Are you absolutely certain, Bitz?” Purity dared. “Mightn’t you have seen that lilac pericoat three weeks ago instead, at the tea for Circlestung Supper Day, Bitz?” Silence. “We oughtn’t be hasty, not after the mixup with poor Lyndee Bocks.”

Bitzy sniffed. “That mistake was entirely understandable, Purity, and you know so as well as I do. If we were a week or so early in our administration of justice, what’s the difference? The Bockses are always in flagrant defiance of one tenet or another, and Lyndee would have met an ill fate eventually in any event.”

“Yes, Bitzy. I suppose she would have.”

“Rawella Eightsguard!” NiNi Leibowitz exclaimed again, half- striving for a truer note of sympathy. Her instrument of false concern was poorly played, Purity couldn’t help but observe. She put it down to lack of practice.

“I’m afraid so. But here: Purity, you’re the cleverest of us four, you should appreciate the concerns of propriety and its enforcement. Oh, I know you’ve always been especially close with poor Rawie and her sister, but I daresay you’ll be a great comfort to Brindle Eightsguard over the next few days.”

Purity Kloo nodded in agreement, not showing for a moment that she hadn’t the slightest idea who Bitzy and the twins were talking about. Rawie? Brindle? The only Eightsguard Purity remembered was an old bag named Druessa, and she’d been Killed early on after the Writ of Community, during the first wave. There was no point in asking for clarification— Purity might as well wear a hoop skirt and skin her mastiff for a stole—her coterie wouldn’t tolerate any chink in their collective armor. Perceived weakness was a worthless commodity of late, which didn’t exactly play toward Purity’s hand, but she hadn’t grown to womanhood among the Last Court thus far without learning a dozen ways to disguise her spotty memory for names, faces, and events of social importance. Purity sighed. A great and weighty sigh, contrived to mean any number of weighty and great things to whomever might be scanning her armor for chinks. What a bore of a vigil, she thought.

“Rawella was terrible at cards.” Purity strove for apathy. “I’ll miss watching her lose. For a while, anyway. Are we still hiding body parts to delay the binding?”

“Was?” NoNo asked with a spark of interest, “Is our Purity developing a taste for blood?”

“Justice,” corrected Bitzy and Purity simultaneously, just as Purity had intended.

“Well, you know of course what this means, NoNo,” continued Bitzy. “We were all the best of friends with Rawella, naturally, but she’s gone and broken the rules, hasn’t she?”

“Well, of course she has, and she should be punished.” Purity wondered if she’d taken her abetment a step too far. “But—”

“—And she will be, darling. You know what the Circle would say: ‘When we break our own rules, we break our own necks.’ Better we girls administer justice with delicacy than allow our parents to bully the poor girl to Death.”

Purity was certain to a fact that Baron Kloo wouldn’t give two dirties as to what wardrobe standards Rawella Eightsguard adhered—whoever she was. He certainly wouldn’t wish harm on a young lady for wearing the same pericoat twice in a fortnight. As petty as the other house leaders could be, she had difficulty imagining any of them condescending to care one way or another about Bitzy’s couture inquisition, except perhaps as a tolerable distraction for their daughters.

More likely to catch them bickering about how to deal with the vigilante Killer in their midst. A rogue Circle member who had, apparently, been Killing servants in the northern basements of Dendrite’s Folly. The cowards—her father excluded, of course, and Purity felt that conviction did not arise purely from filial adoration—had been all too happy to Murder one another en masse, but one rumored bastard going off on his own to permanently Kill a few nobles and handful of stable boys and suddenly the Circle was too busy staring at their bootlaces to do anything but whine.

A servant brought in a tray of coldcumbre sandwiches garnished with thrashmelon slices and citrus from the Dome’s expansive orchards, and the four girls laid down their embroidery hoops to pick at the midday meal. Further conversation would be prohibited until their hostess motioned for the attendant to clear the dishes.

Purity sat with her thoughts and nibbled on the corner of a sandwich triangle while NiNi hummed an annoying fragment of song. Transmigration by death was out of the question, she’d admitted to herself with much reluctance. Her efforts in that direction had borne no fruit. And there could be no daring physical escape: the Dome had been well and truly sealed by the prince. Adepts wove wards into every possible exit— even the filigreed air vents—and praetorians loyal to Fflaen stood guard at the end of virtually every corridor. Their presence was not strictly necessary, but evidently Fflaen desired a constant reminder of the power of the Writ he’d declared that imprisoned the aristocracy within the Dome in the name of their own safety. For all intents the Dome was hermetically sealed— servants, Circle, and families all trapped together. And now, one of them had gone rogue with the Weapon.

Escape from safety had proven impossible, and Purity had discreetly tested every method she could think of, including spelunking through some quite unpleasant culverts. The only demonstrable loophole was even worse than this interminable confinement: True Death. Somehow the Lords Unsung had uncovered a means of opening the Last Gate that did not rely on a soul’s own readiness for oblivion. That had been a surprise; True Death came only to the Dying, who by definition had lived long enough to have earned oblivion.

Bells, the Weapon! That would have once been unthinkable, but now that the lords had a Weapon they could use to Kill— actually Kill— their rivals, the illusion of “community” the Writ had supposedly been intended to foster evaporated like mist in daylight. And so it surprised Purity not one whit that the children had begun to follow their elders’ example, hacking each other apart for the silliest of reasons. If the prince didn’t reappear soon, or if the Writ were not somehow revoked, Purity did not see much hope for the peerage. Not that the nobility deserved much in the way of hope, she reckoned, for all the misery they’d doled out over the millennia.

NiNi and NoNo set down their teacups and pushed away their plates in unison. Bitzy waited a moment longer, then lifted two fingers to alert the servant to clear the table. Within seconds no trace of their meal remained. Purity thought of the fate of Lyndee Bocks, so similarly exacted from their lives—and Rawella Eightsguard, who would soon follow. They couldn’t permanently dispatch their victims the way the Circle and the Killer could, but they’d dumped Lyndee’s parts into three separate cisterns and the poor thing had yet to return. The body-binding enchantment couldn’t be broken, but it could be . . . frustrated. Purity wondered if they mightn’t all end up Dead or minced and dispersed, the nobility either sent into oblivion or rendered useless while their bodies slowly reconstituted.

Traditionally, a duel between body-bound nobles ended in ritual cannibalism. Eating your opponent was the best way to ensure a slow waking— she’d heard the process could take a year.

Could that be the prince’s endgame? Purity wondered, as she tasted the last remaining crumbs of a coldcumbre sandwich. Was the Writ of Community just a ruse to herd the aristocracy into destroying itself? If anyone were capable of such conceit, it would be Fflaen the Fair. Purity stifled a yawn. Maybe it was a symptom of her confinement, but lately she’d had trouble remembering how to care— and then, just when she felt overcome by ennui, she felt a fever to escape, escape, escape. But sometimes she wondered: escape what? Was it just this golden cage? There was a kind of madness bubbling up all around her, but no one seemed to see it. Purity had doubts she couldn’t quite name, and rages she couldn’t quite control, and she ruminated overmuch on the nature of the Weapon and what it must feel like to cease to be. . . .