by Tim Akers
I sniffed, then regretted it. He smelled like stagnant water and the sickness of swamps.
“How do I find out?”
He waved his hand, spreading the fingers like a fan. “Is that all this is about? This gun? Really, Jacob, you’re usually so much more interesting than this.”
“It’s important, Morgan. I can pay.”
“No, Jacob. You can’t. Just because we live in the river doesn’t mean we don’t hear things. And you’ve been making a lot of noise. The Council, Valentine, some of the Founding Families.” He drank a long and slow glass of water, savoring my discomfort as much as the slosh. “I was looking forward to this discussion, Jacob. I thought you might come to me for something interesting. This?” He tapped the revolver, then shook his head.
“There’s more than this involved, Wright. Your old buddies, they’re in on it, too.”
He paused, just as he was reaching for the pitcher to refill his glass. Just a second’s hesitation, then he completed the action. When he set the pitcher down, he stared at me with cold eyes.
“The concerns of the Church are much deeper than this. You can’t claim to have caught the attention of the Algorithm, Jacob. Unless there’s much more to this than I’ve heard.”
“Do the Church concerns include angels, Wright Morgan?” I picked up the pistol. “There’s something in the city. Hunting.”
“How dramatic,” he said glibly, but he had the glass halfway to his lips, and showed no sign of moving it.
“A friend of mine, an anansi familiar with the Artificer’s Guild, says it looks like a cross between the cogwork of the Church and the Artificer’s biotics. It’s killing people, and it’s looking for something. Looking for me, too.”
“Well.” He set his glass down, then rubbed the slack skin around his eyes. “Your friend is a heretic, comparing the holy pattern of the Algorithm to those Artificers and their damn beetles.” Drink. “But he has a lot correct, as well. The pattern, as manifest in the seedcoin, is the body of God. Longing for the pattern in us. Together, we are becoming something more complex. More beautiful.”
“Minus the theology.”
“Cog needs blood, and it needs our mind.” When he talked I could barely see the writhing pool of flat, black worms that replaced his organs, squirming at the back of his throat. “That is the layman’s version.”
“So this Angel?” I asked.
He crossed his arms and stared just above my shoulder. Several long drinks later, he refilled the glass from his pitcher and then steepled his fingers.
“That interests me,” he said.
He was quiet for several moments, not even drinking. When he spoke, his voice was still, like a deep pool.
“I had heard, of course. The events at the Manor Tomb have been spinning the rumor mill. To think, another of the Brilliant would visit us, all this time later.”
“Another?”
“Camilla. Jacob, you know your books.” He was reproachful, disappointed. “Her gifts raised the city up. I wonder what this visit portends.”
“Camilla’s a story, Morgan. A parable.” I took a drink of water, to fit in.
“A story? A story.” His voice rose gradually, like the tide. “Scripture, Jacob. Truth. True enough to end worship of those ghosts.”
The Church liked to bring up the usurpation of the spiritual reign of the Celestes whenever possible. Especially in the company of the Founding Families, who held the ethereal creatures holy for the longest time, held out against the encroachment of the Algorithm. My childhood home had been littered with the Icons of the Celestes, hidden away whenever Churchmen were to visit.
“Not even your own Master Wrights acknowledge that story anymore. Camilla is an origin myth, a convenient vehicle to describe the Church’s ascendancy, and its mastery of the Cog. A child of the Angels, really? No one believes that’s real anymore.”
“The child?” he asked, a grin leaking across his face. “Or the Angels?”
I grimaced. “Two weeks ago, no one believed in Angels.”
“Of course not.” Morgan sniffed, a strange sound in a river-logged head. “Such an enlightened age for Veridon. Clearly absurd to think she was the child of Angels. Right?” Drink, a messy slurp that drained his glass and sucked air. “Because then there would be such a thing as Angels. Which brings us, Jacob, back to your question. What was it, again? What did you want to ask me?”
Morgan’s bond to the Algorithm may have dissolved when his boat capsized and his life washed away so many years ago, but it was clear they still had his loyalty. Strange, but it was probably that fierce devotion that kept him so animate. So many of the Fehn simply faded into the dark current of the Reine, bumping against the piers and scaring children.
Still, he had me. Deny as I may, the problem at hand was an Angel. Mythic or not, propaganda or not, I had seen it twice and killed it once. It was real.
“Yes, okay,” I said, shifting in my seat. “Okay. But it wasn’t just at the Manor. I saw it before, a couple days ago. Up on the Heights.”
“The Heights?” he asked. “The Tombs again? What have they done to attract its attention?”
“That’s what I’m looking into. Though, to be honest, he seemed pretty interested in me. In something I have.”
“I am an old man, Jacob, and dead. Stop playing around with me. What do you have, and what do you know?” He leaned forward. “I can’t help you out if you’re not honest with me.”
“Two things. One was given to me, one I took. A friend of mine, guy I hadn’t seen in a few years. He died, on the Glory of Day. Seemed pretty desperate to get away from someone, desperate enough to crash a Hesperus class zepliner.”
“Sabotage? I thought it was an accident. Faulty PilotEngine, just like…” he stumbled to a halt, awkwardly aware of how close he was to old wounds. He refilled his glass to cover the silence. “Who was your friend?”
“Marcus, the guy I wanted to talk to,” I said, letting him off the hook. “He was coming home from a long trip. Gave me a Cog.” I held out my hands to show the size. “Like nothing I’ve ever seen.”
“Oh,” he said, and leaned back. “I see. And do you… do you have any idea where your friend might have been coming from?”
“Sure.” I slipped the map-artifact out of my coat and put it on the table. Wright Morgan looked stunned, tried to cover with a long drink of water. His bloated hand was shaking. I spun up the map. He nearly dropped the water in his rush to cover the mechanism.
“No need.” His voice was quiet. “So you have it?”
“I do.”
Morgan was troubled. He wouldn’t look at me, and his hands kept moving from the table to his face, pausing to tug at his slowly drying robes.
“So, so. Hell of a thing to bring to me, a man like me. And he gave it to you.”
“He was dying. He asked me to bring it to Veridon.”
“And Tomb? What did they have to do with this?”
“The map comes from their house. They sent him down the falls. I don’t know what they hoped to find.”
“They had no idea. All these years, nothing.” He picked up the map, held it gingerly in his hands. “All these years, and then Tomb gets it. She gave it to them.”
“She?”
He stared wistfully at the map, then set it on the table.
“Do you keep up with your services, Jacob? Does the Family Burn still honor the House of the Algorithm?”
“It’s been years. But my father still goes.” I didn’t bother mentioning the Icon of the Celestes he kept in his pocket every time he crossed into the Church’s corridors.
“You should return. Find a seat near the Tapestry of Hidden Ambition. There is a pillar there, the Pillar of Deep Intentions. North center of the room. Near the old Burn pews, if I remember.”
He stood. Water sloshed from his chair onto the grated floor. He touched the map one more time.
“I’ve been here too long,” he said. His face was looking a bit soft, like a le
ather balloon half-filled. “Best to you, Jacob Burn. And good luck with your legends.”
I watched him turn and go. He left a rapidly drying trail of water, sloshing out from his river-logged feet.
Chapter Eleven
The Chamber of the Heart
THE CHURCH OF the Algorithm is the heart of Veridon. It sits on the south bank of the Ebd river, a gnarled fist grasping the current in fingered bridges, the water flowing over its open palm. Most of the Church is above the river, but the water is harnessed by flow channels, and unknown depths of the holy building exist under the river-turbines and boiler rooms that belch and hiss in the middle of the water.
From the outside, the Church looked like a cancer of architecture. It grew, walls expanding, roofs adding domes and towers that grew together until they became walls. The whole structure bristled with chimneys leaking oily smoke, smoke that pooled in the courtyards that surround the Church. Everything around its bulk was smudged black. The ground rumbled with the hidden engines of their god. I could feel it in my heels as we walked up.
Emily and I stood outside the penitent’s gate, watching the line of beggars huddled in the flank of the Church. These were men and women who couldn’t afford the upkeep on their cogwork, people with clockwork lungs and oiled hearts who could no longer pay for the licensed coggers in the city. They came to the Church, the source, the holy men of cog. They paid in blood and time, lent their bodies to the Church’s curious Wrights. They came out changed, or not at all.
My father had suggested that I come here, when the Academy’s doctors failed, when the best money my father was willing to spend couldn’t find a cure. He had meant it as a threat. I took it as surrender, and left.
“They creep me out,” Emily said. She stood close to me, her hands inside the wide shawl we had purchased that morning. She had a gun in there, to my dismay.
“Not their fault. Rotten people, with rotten hearts.” We went across the stone courtyard to one of the strangled gardens, passing through to the next little courtyard. “What should creep you out is inside.”
“I’ve heard it was beautiful. Or at least impressive.”
“Those are very different things.” I ducked my head as we approached the Church’s hulking flank. “You’ll see.”
Like so many things in Veridon, the presence of the Algorithm was a privilege you had to earn. Beggars stayed outside. Citizens approached the murals, the finished mysteries of the pattern. To reach the heart, the ever changing center of the Church, you had to be a Councilor, the blood of Veridon. Today, we were citizens.
The pillar that dead Wright Morgan had described to me was near the heart, in the privileged audience of the machinery. I wanted to get there, but things were too dangerous at the moment. I didn’t know what role the Church was playing in all this. If they were part of the shadowy pursuit that I seem to have attracted, I didn’t want to walk into their parlor and present my credentials. That hadn’t gone too well with the Tombs, and I thought I knew what to expect of Angela. The Church I didn’t understand.
The doors were plain. The Wright standing to one side didn’t pay us any mind, bobbing his brown robed head at the clink of our coin. He didn’t even ask us which door, just cycled the Citizen’s Gate.
The heavy wood clattered behind us. The corridor was dark and smelled of coal smoke and overclocked engines. The only light was from the altar manifolds around the corner. It took a minute for my eyes to adjust. Emily was tugging on my sleeve. She had the gun out, close to her body. The air around us was heavy, the walls slithering with barely perceived clockwork, deep vents puffing and groaning in the darkness.
“Let’s get this over with.” She glanced back at the door behind us. “It’s like being eaten by the city.”
“You would have been a terrible Pilot,” I said.
“Like you would know.”
The closer we got to the mural room, the clearer we could see the walls around us. Everything shuddered with the constant grinding of the engines. The very blackness seemed part of it, vibrating at an incredible pitch. The air in my lungs felt like hydraulic fluid, crashing, surging, driving me forward.
The Citizen’s Room was little more than display. It was a long, thin hall that ran through the width of the building like an axle through a wheel. The walls were alive, cogs instead of bricks, shafts instead of pillars, sunk into the floor or powering intricate murals on the ceiling.
That was all show. The true mysteries were clustered at the altars. Waves of cogwork bulged out into the hallway, like some great sea beast that burst from the wall and beached itself on the stone floor. These were the most active parts of the room, highly articulated, nearly sentient in their complexity.
“Is that a face?” Emily asked, motioning to the nearest altar. I had a brief flash of Patron Tomb, possessed beneath the Church and communing with the Algorithm, but then the vision passed.
“More than that.” I pointed over. The altar was a long tongue of cogwork lolling out from the wall, pistons and gears convulsing in tight waves. The tip of the protuberance ended in the shoulders and a head, a metal man who struggled against the floor. With each convulsion he was swallowed a little, drawn into the tongue like an egg being swallowed by some enormous snake. He gasped and clawed his way forward, scrambling against the stone until the next convulsion; drawn back in, and the struggle continued.
“That’s foul,” Emily said. “People worship these things?”
“They worship the pattern behind them.” I left the cog to its eternal struggle and went on to the next altar. “These things are salvaged from the river, Em. Pieces and bits, dredged up from the depths, sometimes arriving in whole parts. So the Wrights say. The fact that they fit together at all is pretty amazing.”
“The fact that the Wrights spend years piecing them together, now that’s amazing.”
“Obsession is a powerful thing.” I stopped at the next display. It seemed dead, a complicated mouth of pistons that glowed with some inner fire. Waves of heat rolled off it.
“So where’s this pillar?”
“Different room. We’re going to have to sneak through.” The hallway was fairly empty at this hour. Most supplicants paid their awe after work. “For now, just look suitably devout. And put the gun away.”
“This can’t be coincidence,” she said.
“Hm? The gun, Em.” I turned to look at her. She was across the hall, the pistol dangling from her thin hand. “Hide it.”
She grimaced at me, then folded the shawl around the revolver and tucked the bundle under her arm. She motioned me closer. I went to look.
“What is it?” I asked.
“This.” She pointed at one of the altars, a smaller display that looked like a puzzlebox. Sections of it slid and shuffled, disappearing into the box and re-emerging elsewhere. There was some iconography on the tiles, so that it looked like an animated story, but I couldn’t find any rhythm.
“What?” I asked. “It just looks obscure to me.”
“Here, right here.” She had her hand close to the box, as though waiting to pluck up one of the tiles. “No, it’s gone now. Hang on.” Her hand drifted. “There!”
A box shifted out of the central structure of the altar, sliding along the top. It was a music box, the fragile fingers of its comb dancing along a cylinder as it went. Seconds later it was gone, but the music lurked through the hallway.
“It was that song,” I said.
“The music box, that I gave you to take to Angela Tomb.” Emily turned to me, played with her lip nervously. “It’s the same song.”
“And where did you get it?”
“Some guy. He hired me to hire you. I thought it was a Family thing, but it could have been the Tombs, trying to get you up on the Heights—”
“Or it could have been someone from the Church,” I finished for her. “Same as the two who visited your office. And maybe the people who hired Pedr to toss my place, too.”
“Are we sure we want to be here
?”
“Oh, I’m sure I don’t, actually. But Morgan said—”
“He’s a Wright. Or was,” Emily said. “You sure you can trust him?”
I sighed and looked nervously back at the altar. The music box made another pass, the same song, faster this time. Emily gripped the bundled mass of the pistol tighter, working her hand under the cloth to touch the grip.
“Can I help you, citizen?”
We whirled like children stealing candy. There was a Wright standing there, the guy from the door. He had his hands folded beneficently at his waist.
“It’s all… it’s just.” I gasped, trying to work up the kind of dull awe the guy expected. “It’s amazing.”
“Oh, I understand. The pattern is such a thing to behold. Do you often make the trip to the Algorithm?”
“Frequently,” Emily said. “I mean, every chance we get. In the city. Tell me, uh, Wright. We’ve heard that there are deeper chambers. Where the pattern is more… more raw.”
“Purer miracles,” I quickly added, tapping into my childhood to summon the correct wording. “The raw stuff of the pattern.”
The Wright raised his eyebrows at me, but shook his head. “The inner chambers are reserved for the glorious, my children. The Elders of the Church and the Founders of the city. Now, unless you’ve found a way onto the Council, I don’t think I can take you there.”
“I do,” Emily said. She had the pistol in hand. “We’re very serious about our enlightenment.”
I swore under my breath. Wrights like to talk about their little miracles. I felt sure we could have talked our way in. Emily’s eyes were wild.
“Now, child,” the Wright said, raising his hands and backing away. “There’s no need for violence.”
“Look, holy man. I seek the godsdamn pattern. Show it.”
He paled, glanced at me. I nodded. We got our way.
THE CHURCH OF God, the Church of the Algorithm. The church of pistons and gears, angles of driving pulleys, escapements clicking, cogs cycling in holy period; a temple of clock and oil. The chamber of my youth.
