The Waking Engine (49 page)

She continued dragging herself forward with broken nails, hissing venom and steam from the grill of her perfect silver mouth—until ancillary stabilizers emerged from the segments beneath her torso, pushing the Cicatrix slowly, slowly upright. She twisted her neck, turning her enormous helm this way and that. Something in her head unlatched, and the Cicatrix craned her head forward, sliding a smaller version of her horned war helm out from the larger bulk.

What is this? Cooper thought. Purity cursed.

Like skirts parting at a clever slit, the Cicatrix drew back the lower segments of her exoskeleton and stepped out of the carapace, dainty feet touching the golden floor. One, two, three, four, five, six—six smooth legs, harvested from three fey girl-children, still rubber-boned with youth, whose hips and ankles would obey the torture of machine choreography. Once, twice, thrice the Cicatrix kicked her heels and patted forward, full of doll- like menace. Aluminum petticoats served double duty as cooling fins, hiding the juncture of harvested limbs and mobile chassis.

She left behind a molted shell still rearing in a Cicatrix- shape: empty horns, hollow carapace, skeletal arm servos. A dragon, an insect, a dancer— the Cicatrix pressed forward. “Try as you like, CooperOmphale,” the Cicatrix gloated, skittering with the skin-crawling ululations of a centipede; released from the vast length of her complete exoskeleton, she was fully mobile and terrifying. “I have contingencies for contingencies, and bodies the likes of which you would not believe.

“The chains once buried across and beneath this city serve an even older purpose, for instance.” Shit-your-jeans terrifying. “Oh, Cooper, I’ll show you. After I birth the living madness into the worlds, boy, I will fill this city. All it takes is one god-machine-empress costume change, and I will seize the reins and ride this beast into the suns.”

“Oh, fuck me once in the chimney and twice at the gate,” Purity cursed again.

“It’s the svarning, isn’t it? Somehow . . .”

“She’s been drinking it,” Cooper said aloud, as he realized it was true. “Holding it back in her crazy bullshit magic engineering complex until the perfect time to let the inevitable happen. Then all that sickness will flood out into the metaverse at once, with the city as ground zero.”

“I may have made a poor prince”—Asher stepped forward—“but I will not let that happen.” He looked like a kind of abstract stone eagle, or perhaps a moth-man made from chalk and bone. Or a beta fish and Apollo. Whatever Asher was, he was not human, no one could mistake that. He was of the First People, vast and unknowable. Except that Cooper knew him. He swore, he did.

Cooper looked to Sesstri, full of questions, who nodded at Asher’s transformation, her face filled with sorrow.

BeyondMeNow, Cooper heard her worry—had she known? BeyondAndBroken.

Ex-Prince Asher tackled the Cicatrix without warning, moving faster than the eye as always—now a streak of white light, not bones—and in a trice her enormous head whipped backward, gripped between Asher’s shining hands. He ripped cables from her chassis as he pulled his face close to her own.

“In all these lonely endless worlds I love only two women,” he hissed into the grille where her ear should have been, “And you have hurt both of them.”

The Cicatrix howled, oil spraying from her torn cabling, but he could not snap her neck.

The Cicatrix threw him over her shoulder, cracking his crest against the floor. “You can’t even spell the alloys that replaced my spinal column, Fflaen.” She laughed, an autotuned sound that remixed some internal system static into a cruel arpeggio. “Thorn and thorax!” The Cicatrix shook her head, the slender tips of her war helm sending sympathetic impulses to its empty giant twin behind her, which mirrored the movement. Then she began to nod, and the empty carapace nodded as well. Contingencies.

She lifted her inorganic hand, and the gold floor rippled—scrollwork and circuitry like fine lines of filigree lifted themselves from the metal beneath and undulated like rapt snakes. The Cicatrix shrugged, and the metal lines shrugged with her.

“You don’t see me, Fflaen, or you would see that I am prepared for anything.” The filigree lines wrapped themselves around Asher, lifting him bodily from the floor. Then they began to burrow into his body, all razorthin and right angles. Asher screamed.

“Your little red goddess thinks she’s ruined my fun by opening the Dome and breaking my toy before I could play with it.” The Cicatrix pouted. “But why cry, when I can try to fix what you’ve ruined?” Borne by the wire-thin circuit lines and dripping white blood, Asher’s body floated into the center of the spherical engine chamber.

“One of the First People powered this engine for ages beyond counting.” She nodded toward the smoldering corpse across the room. “I don’t see why you won’t do, for a spell.”

The queen shuffled her baby legs till she faced her abandoned exoskeleton, concentration in her eyes. She lifted her arms and adjusted her torso until her stance matched the exoskeleton’s positioning, and engaged it. She raised her hands and twisted her shoulders, and the exoskeleton mirrored her motions. Twinning herself, the Cicatrix reached up and dragged her now-empty chassis through the hole in the ceiling.

“With an ordinary machine, of course, this wouldn’t be possible,” she cooed. The machine’s piezoelectric spine bristled with an influx of electricity: rows of teeth, rows of fins. The Cicatrix moaned in pleasure, arching her own spine as well. “Ooh, science.”

Cooper panicked. Sesstri was wounded, maybe mortally. Purity had done what she could, and Prama was traumatized and drained almost dry. So Cooper did the only thing he could think of, he threw himself at the Cicatrix’s legs and did his best to entangle himself in the childrens’ legs that supported her.

The queen bellowed and tried to kick him off, but Cooper refused to let go. She dragged him along the golden floor, and he fought against the legs of young girls. Everything was nightmare. But there were brownies inside the queen—Cooper wondered, could he coax them into suicide, if he promised them freedom instead? Could a pixie powering a vivisistor choose to . . . secede? Cooper held on as the etched floor scrubbed his ruined back, he lied faeries to their deaths, and tore at the flesh of children, anything to stop the Cicatrix from killing Asher, or worse.

You do not obey your queen, he shouted into the systems he could sense, the ones attached to the legs he clutched, you obey a monster who has stolen her shape. As the Cicatrix ground him into the floor, Cooper seduced the creatures—spirits of nature—that maintained her grafted dancing feet.

Amazingly, it worked. One by one her doll legs numbed and blued, as six yellow, orange, and finally red LEDs pulsed across the underside of her abdomen. Cooper could hear the alarms ringing inside the Cicatrix: tissue oxygenation was zero, crucified pixies screaming prophecy and system failure. The stolen legs tore away, soft and spongy.

The Cicatrix howled and whipped her abdomen, shedding the false pelvis and its six seeping stumps. Away flew the corrugated petticoats of her mille-feuille cooling fins, revealing the triangular tail of a trilobite. Cooper rolled away and hit the outer wall of the engine room, knocking his head hard. Asher still floated in midair, transfixed by dozens of gold circuit-wires. Cooper picked himself up, and the Cicatrix shot toward him, clawing at the floor as her short tail propelled her. Then she lifted her head, her shoulders and, impossibly, her insectile lower half.

She levitated. Of course she did. Cooper threw himself at the queen’s waist, but she shed her trilobite tail like a cashmere skirt, and Cooper found himself rolling along the floor again, discarded segments squirming against his skin.

This was her last layer, there was no more artifice beneath. Nothing but bone and meat remained below her waist—half a faerie drifted toward him, murder in her eyes. For a woman who’d armored nearly every limb, organ, and orifice in what remained of her original body, it seemed strange and, somehow, ungentlemanly to Cooper for him to see her bare hip sockets—pitted and dry, clearly arthritic, dead.

“Darling, darling, don’t protest. She’s family!” A merry voice sounded from the stairs below the entrance, and a red-coated Oxnard Terenz-de- Guises appeared, the arm of his lady wife gripped in one bejeweled hand. He raised an eyebrow when he saw his prince, wrapped in gold lace, hanging in midair.

The marchioness hissed at her husband, who let her go with a forbearing smile. “Now, for a girl who kills her papa daily,” he said, “you don’t sound like a very attentive daughter. Can we try again?”

“Mother?” Lallowë appeared stricken. “Is that you?” It had been so long since her mother had looked like a woman—and now that she did, it felt awful.

“Go away,” the Cicatrix coughed. “My failure.” She reached out for Cooper’s throat.

But Cooper found a reserve of willpower he did not know he had, and closed his eyes against her advance. He held up his hand, the one with the missing finger, and felt the blood moving through his hand into the pinkie that powered Lallowë’s vivisistor. Lallowë and the Cicatrix were connected by blood, and he was connected to Lallowë—he could not talk down every fey sprite in every vivisistor, they littered the Cicatrix like tumors— but perhaps he could do something more.

“I am an acme of things accomplish’d, and I an encloser of things to be.” Cooper quoted Walt Whitman to his own blood as if his veins contained a spirit with whom he could commune, and he spoke aloud to the cavernous gold room filled with gods dead and living. As Chesmarul’s voice had awed him in the cathedral-forest of her mind, so Cooper’s voice thickened the air like soup, then honey, slowing down the apparent passage of time for the others. “I celebrate myself, and sing myself/And what I assume you shall assume/For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.”

He stole the poetry that unfolded inside his memory, which he wielded like prophecy, and was glad the verses were Walter’s. Not that the words themselves mattered, at all—what mattered was the intention to commune with the spirit of his blood, threaded through the ether from hand to finger and back again.

“Have you felt so proud to get at the meaning of poems?” Cooper called out like a braggart, and the Cicatrix froze with a look of horror as his intent caused her kernel to panic. “Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all poems.” Faerie logic cores began their infinite sum failures.

“You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, nor look through the eyes of the dead, nor feed on the spectres in books.” Cooper healed Sesstri, who coughed in surprise, soaked through with blood that suddenly no longer seeped from the wound in her gut.

“You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me.” Lallowë wrinkled her brow in momentary confusion, as though she’d been smacked. His blood! Cooper’s body felt filled with fire—Lallowë did not know it yet, but the link between them no longer flowed both ways. The blood flowed, but any attempt on her part to exploit the connection would be violently rejected.

“You shall listen to all sides and filter them from your self.” Light danced across gold as Prama and Asher spread the finlike wing-things that sprouted from their shoulders and lower backs. Asher hung his head in shame; Prama lifted hers higher.

Cooper focused on his pounding heartbeat and the blood that had become so central to the fate of the metaverse. When he seized control of the Cicatrix’s vivisistor network, his perception of time slowed as his mind expanded to apprehend the sudden vastness. Nearby, he felt the queen’s vivisistors—a cluster of local stars in tight formation. But he felt others, too, far away from the City Unspoken. They pulled at him with enormous gravity, as old and distant as stars in the night sky, spangled across the metaverse. Were they new? Some seemed to flicker awake while he watched.

Cooper refocused on the Cicatrix and the stars comprising the constellation of vivisistors within the queen began to flare up, then fade away. Popping sounds like dying lightbulbs filled his ears, as some of the fey vivisistors began to crack open, incapacitating the Cicatrix’s systems and disemboweling the wee faeries who powered them. They went too easily, Cooper thought, trying to remember the next line from “Song of Myself.”

“You shall possess the good of the earth and sun, (there are millions of suns left.)” But her little suns were gone. Deprived of power, errors swamping her systems, the Cicatrix collapsed to the floor; the sound of her dry hip sockets splintering against the metal made Cooper wince, even in his trance. Lallowë had tears in her eyes, but did not move.

The length of golden lace that impaled Asher drooped toward the floor, and Prama pulled him down and began the painstaking task of removing the filaments woven through his alien body.

The Cicatrix’s laughter sounded like a broken engine. She was running on reserves, dying and in pain. “You’ve won so many battles,” she quavered. “Shattered so many thoughtful contingencies: banished my allies; defeated their host; murdered my daughter and, it seems, myself. You’ve rendered warheads useless and agitated vivisistors into sedition. So many weapons you’ve countered and disabled, but you have not yet met my weapon of choice.” She twisted her face in pain and pushed herself up on her arms, pivoting from her shattered pelvis. “And then, of course, I cannot stop myself from wondering: what will you do when the other engines begin to wake?”

The lost queen began to laugh but choked on engine oil and, unable to breathe, clawed at her throat with one hand. The pressure valves beneath her diaphragm had failed, and as her atrophied lungs struggled to compensate, the queen pointed a broken finger and tried to curse her progeny. Denied voice, her lips fell off in a cloud of steam as the silver mouthplate fell off of her face and hit the floor with a clatter, trailing blood where it had dislodged from her upper jaw, its vocalization mechanism squawking wet static. The quicksilver lips stopped moving at last and lay still as a broken mask.

The Cicatrix tried to cover her disfigured mouth and throat with her good hand without falling over again, but there was too much exposed flesh—her tongue dangled, impotent amidst a clutch of sparking wires, and the skin of her lower face and neck had been peeled back from her palate to her collarbone, curtains of bloody meat hanging loose from beneath her upper lip.