The Waking Engine (13 page)

“Ladies?” Bitzy reconvened. “Have we all finished our needlework for the afternoon?”

“As close to finished as can be, I suppose.” Purity frowned at her own work, black flowers blossoming across the face grille of her hood. What cannot be avoided must be endured, her father said.

“Well then. Shall we attend to our responsibilities?” Bitzy put up a good effort at seeming reluctant.

“Yes,” said NoNo.

“Let’s,” said NiNi.

With that, the four girls stood up, smoothed their skirts, and donned the blue silk hoods, each helping the others secure them in place with three snug bows down the back of the head. Then they each pulled razorhoned sickles from behind their cushions and filed out of the room to butcher Rawella Eightsguard over a breach of etiquette.

Not everyone came to the city to Die. Beside the trickle of dreamers and pilgrims who followed the tunnel to the Apostery sat the carnival tailgaters Cooper had seen, musicians beating out their rhythm to the patchwork songs of the polyglot Dead. Elsewhere, on the mile-wide plazas surrounding the sealed Dome, the cobblestones bustled with hawkers and vendors plying the hundred trades fueled by the industry of Death: indulgences and remembrances, relics of questionable authenticity. Fingers of vanished saints and martyrs, gold-forged wigs of goddesses long since divorced and forgotten—icons to suit sentiments that hearkened from all the near-numberless universes whose Dying converged in the City Unspoken.

Among the elite of the worlds a teleological tourism existed, and guides traveled with cadres of archmagi and offworld royalty who took a dozen different routes to see the squalid splendor of the City Unspoken: astrally projected, temporarily incarnated in borrowed bodies; even physical entrances were rare but not unheard of—if the emperor of twelve microcosmi wished a window opened to the Piazza of Distant Roads, there would be a party of city nobility waiting to greet their otherworld peers and whatever army of adepts the otherworlders employed to make such a voyage possible. Terenz-de-Guises, Bratislaus, Blavatsky-Day-Louis, Kloo, FenBey—the most powerful noble houses welcomed trade in any form.

And then there were the Eightfold Worlds—realities that physically adjourned the pocket dimension of the city and had, in ages long vanished, functioned as both suburbia and supply route. Today they were remembered as a lesson in a kind of a abstracted urban decay: left to rot, the paths to and through the Eightfold Worlds had rusted shut, collapsed due to poor maintenance, vanished, or been rendered useless by the truancy of municipal oversight. Once they had been cathedral worlds whose aisles led to the City Unspoken. Only three of the Eightfold Worlds remained accessible, but raw materials still made their way into the city with profitably regular custom: Terenz-de-Guises, its hands in every pie, trafficked in mineral and lumber trade, while the mercantile classes forded agriculture, livestock, and other necessities across the thresholds and through the canals that separated the city’s districts. Work continued, such as it was, albeit diminished in both capacity and profitability—the city missed governance, if not its governors.

So the barge that made its way down the canal that separated the annexed blocks north of Dismemberment from the Callow Heights and the shrinking demesne of Purseyet blended seamlessly into the nighttime traffic of industry, weighed down by crates of goods and crewed by a sullen bunch of dark-browed men and women.

The madman at the prow drew little enough extra attention—madness was merely another commodity here, and some of the more superstitious local business owners even considered it good luck to employ at least one lunatic in some capacity or another—a moon-touched potato peeler might bring good fortune to an innkeeper, and more than one nutter worked as deckhand on the many barges that plied the city’s arterial waterways.

“Pioneers!” called out the bearded man standing afore. The night wind whipped his unkempt hair about his face and pulled back the corner of the canvas that covered the body at his feet. Cooper slept on, oblivious to the madman or the shattered sky that glittered above the water.

“Enough, Walter,” a husky voice scolded from the flimsy shack that served as the scow’s deckhouse. A stocky woman with arms muscled like a pair of pythons stood in the open hatchway, her hay-colored hair cropped short at the nape of her neck and a grimace on her thick-featured face. “We must be quick about our business tonight, and I’ll have less of your crowing and more of your hands securing the hawser, if you please.” The lighter-class scow had seen better days, but Captain Bawl ran her boat like a ship, and all the oakum-patched, split-bitted hull in the worlds wouldn’t discourage her professional pride, even if tonight’s dispatch did leave a nasty taste in her mouth.

“But the moon . . .” the wild man protested, searching the sky. “Won’t rise tonight no matter how you howl, so lay off and get to work or I’ll weigh you down with stones and drop you in the soup. The patron wants us there by midnight, and you have enormous chains to watch out for.” And there were—huge, rusted chains crisscrossed this section of the canals, as they did elsewhere across the city. Bawl had no idea what the buried chains were about, but they were as thick as her barge and could shear her hull in two if her coxswain didn’t do his job.

Walter lowered his eyes and nudged the unconscious body with a foot. He wondered in his mad way if the boy was dead or merely sleeping, and if there had ever been a difference between the two states of being in the first place.

“Do the sleepers sleep? Daughters of the West?” He looked at his Captain imploringly. “All the prisoners in the prisons. The righteous and the wicked. All the joyous, all the sorrowing, all the living, all the dying? Do the sleepers sleep?”

“Yes, yes, the kid is fine, Walter. Stop fretting.” Bawl was unmoved by Walter’s sympathy but answered him nonetheless. It wouldn’t do to have her token madman upsetting the quality, if the quality ever decided to show his face above deck.

Walter combed his fingers through long brine-yellowed curls. “The ghostly millions, yes.” He nodded, seemingly satisfied. “The places of the dead quickly fill’d.”

“You care too much, old man.” She should have ignored him, but the intensity in his shrunken eyes compelled her, as it had when she first took him aboard. He sulked out at her from beneath his broad-brimmed hat.

“Whoever walks a furlong without sympathy walks to his own funeral dressed in his shroud,” Walter explained, as if to a child.

“Okay, care then, if it’s so damned important. See if I mind.”

“Captain Bawl,” snapped a voice from behind her. “If you’re quite through humoring your beast there, I believe we approach my point of disembarkation?”

Tam stepped out of the cabin, the torchlight catching his fox-roan hair and turning it to copper. No sooner had he scraped the guts off his face than his mistress dispatched him to deliver a package, a package that had turned out to be a man. Tam sighed, fingering the bloodstains on his lapel and pitying the human cargo. He looked handsome, if a bit oversized, but anyone unlucky enough to gather the attention of the Marchioness TerenzdeGuises and her machinated mother was dog meat. Tam hadn’t a clue why Lallowë wanted the childborn taken to this particular destination— probably to lure out the pale vagrant, see if or how important the dog meat was to Asher. She had an unhealthy obsession with that man.

Tam repeated himself and clapped his hands for the captain’s attention—Captain Bawl mistrusted hands as smooth as those, but everyone needs to eat, and the marchioness paid better than most.

“Aye,” she said curtly, remembering the price she’d been promised.

There wouldn’t be sufficient payment for the band of toughs who’d led the assault on the Manfrix house, though—the lucky majority had died, and were now enjoying the freedom of a new sky. Some few had withdrawn from the mess without grave injury, but most of the men had to be left behind on the embankment, minus an eye or an arm or skin to hold their guts inside. Bells, but those two could fight!

Bawl had seen the disaster from outside. It was supposed to have been surgical—strike quickly after dusk when the marks were at their least vigilant. Ha. That had been a relative concept—the gray man must be some kind of martial savant, the captain had decided. She’d once seen one of Prince Fflaen’s praetorian guard duel outside the Way of Forgotten Methods garrison, back in the days before the sealing of the Dome, and he’d had something of the gray man’s grace. But Asher fought barehanded. He’d been everywhere.

And the Manfrix woman hadn’t been much easier to subdue. Whatever informant had pinned her as—how had the documents described her?—“an inconsequential academic” would have to reconsider his or her notion of “consequence” once the mercenaries who’d survived the razor kisses of her blades came calling.

The captain had refused to take part in any of the bloodletting. It was only the insane amount of coin that the marchioness had placed on tonight’s business that had gotten Bawl involved at all, and while she’d agreed to take the cargo aboard the Barge Brightly once the toughs had hauled the body out of the house—at great cost— she’d let nary a one of them set foot on her ship. Her boat, she corrected herself with a shake of her head. Bawl might have fallen far from the admiralty she’d led lives ago, but she still had standards. Ethics. Battered as they were— and bells, were they battered.

Thoughts of the botched abduction evaporated as the barge rounded a bend and Bawl’s destination loomed before her. The peaked white building was half keep, half palace, and the sight of its walls shining against the night took the captain’s breath away every time she passed this way. She’d never had a reason to stop and stare before, though, let alone to moor at the jetty of canal-stained marble that reached out into the water like a pale finger.

“At last.” Tam exhaled with relief. “I’ll take a brothel over a barge any day.”

La Jocondette was more than a brothel—it was the remainder of an age when the whores of the City Unspoken had ruled their own district, Purseyet, like queens. Once, the lifebinds that now held them hostage to pimps and madams had been no different than the charms that distinguished peerage from hoi polloi: the nobility, governors, and courtesans had all been deemed too important to have their city lives interrupted by as minor an inconvenience as death. So it was with great honor that they submitted themselves to be bound to their bodies, bound to their city, and bound to their duty.

Times had changed.

The courtly arts had long ago become devalued, the nobility devolved into a handful of families clutching at whatever diminished grandeur could be found—and these days whores were merely whores, body-bound or regular flavor. But La Jocondette retained more than a glimmer of her former prominence, and her edifice reminded the city that once it had counted courtesans among the peers of the realm. Men and women who, lovely of flesh and spirit, had helped ease the passage of the Dying and other pilgrims—like the trickle of dead saints who came to join the Winnowed in their caverns beneath the streets. La Jocondette reminded the worlds of that less ignoble past: scrubbed daily, wreathed with flowers and with a candle lit in each of its tidy windows, La Jocondette dominated the back end of Purseyet. The rest of the district had succumbed to disrepair and the ceaseless encroachment of squatters and industry, but the white stone building kept manicured lawns that extended to its wrought-iron gates and wrapped around to kiss the canal at its rear.

Like the two-faced god of portals whose face supported some of the grander bridges over the waterways, La Jocondette presented two faces to the city—one to the ruined street and one to the canal. Once, she would have greeted patrons from both ends; now the only traffic she saw came from the water, since the adjacent streets were no longer considered safe enough for her dwindling visitors.

Still, she maintained an air of beauty despite the humiliation that the years had forced upon her. La Jocondette could never be raped while her walls glowed in the limelight—she withstood the ravages of dissipation like a queen in a tumbrel, refusing to hang her head until the executioner held her neck down against the chopping block.

The Lady waited at the end of the jetty, swathed in white muslin, the pearl-white façade of La Jocondette gleaming behind her. They were versions of one another—both glowing from within the enshrouding filth, regal despite any circumstance. The Lady found her best light, silhouetted from behind while limestone and burning torches lit the building from aesthetically pleasing angles, banishing the shadows that swarmed the neighboring buildings. Fruit trees lined the path from the chateau to the dock and glowing enchantments had been set among them, floating between the branches like lazy fireflies.

The sight was nearly enough to make Captain Bawl herself gape.

“Welcome back, friend,” called the woman on the dock to Tam. He assembled his face into its most winsome mask.

“As always, my Lady, I feel I as though I have never left your gracious home. Once welcomed into the bosom of La Jocondette it is impossible for the heart of a man to leave.” Tam bowed so deeply that his hair brushed the wood of the deck, and Bawl would have laughed if she hadn’t been so eager to be off, coin purse in hand, away from this business of kidnapping.

The woman in white nodded and smiled generously at the footman, but made no move to help him as he stepped onto the dock. She remained in perfect poise, every inch a queen, as Tam motioned for Bawl’s crew to hurry unloading their cargo.

“Be about it then,” Bawl muttered as two of her crewmen dropped the canvas-wrapped body on the dock. The mistress of La Jocondette appeared not to notice any of it— not the body, not the barge, not the men tracking canal mud across her tidy little jetty.

Bawl winced as Walter stepped to the edge of the barge and put one boot on the mooring bitt, pressing his hat against his heart like a lovesick suitor. To the Lady, he said with reverence, “Every moment of light and dark is a miracle.”

To Captain Bawl’s surprise, the Lady bowed her head toward the old deckhand and replied in kind: