by Anthony Huso
The creatures were quite intelligent but they were plagued by their half-states, unable to escape the clutches of madness brought on by too much of two kinds of blood.
“We’ll get you names, you muck. We’ll get you all the names you need for the crawler with the Csrym T.”
“Wonderful,” said Mr. Naylor as though speaking to one of the burgomasters that frequented his shows. “I’ll set about it at once just as soon as I know who she is.”
Something large and heavy slid into the water. The Council was breaking up.
Mr. Naylor stood and brushed himself off as though doing so might solve the ruinous slime that had soaked into his pants. He turned and began sloshing back toward the platform and the weary elevator.
“Mr. Naylor!” burped the voice from the island. It was the first time it had spoken Hinter instead of the guttural language used during the meeting. The first time it had used his name. “Make sure you are careful on this one. Make certain you are extra, extra careful.”
“Of course,” said Mr. Naylor. He smiled and continued toward the platform where he crammed himself back into the tiny compartment and rode the banging lightless box back to reality.
CHAPTER 14
The brown many-tiered spires of Isca City slid skyward over a twisting baroque catacomb of lanes and streets. Glimbenders squeezed out of offal-piled nests behind glowing clock towers.
In the evening, they took to the air: mad droves of singular candent eyeballs stitched with fur and bat wings. They tumbled, gracile bits of blackened ash or street confetti into the sky; whirling out from belfries and cupolas and campaniles, searching for stray cats and dogs, quadrupeds of virtually any kind into whose brains they would drive their slug-filled ovum.
In Lampfire Hills, the buildings grew together as in other sections of the city: nine, twelve, twenty stories high. Dozens of flying buttresses and arches straddled the lanes at various heights, passing thrust onto and between buildings, shoring up the city with dangerous interdependence.
A clockwork shop on the corner of Tower and Mark displayed cuckoos and pocket watches, flickering with the bubbly green glow of chemiostatic fluid.
A deep-hooded figure slid past the shop, down Mark Street. It turned east on Seething Lane, left the pawnshops and clothiers behind, walking briskly for the derelict brewery that sulked in the shadow of Ghoul Court’s south side.
Miriam stopped under the huge decaying shingle whose paint had erupted in a rash of hives. She could barely read the name: VINDAI’S BREWERY.
She melted into the darkness along the north wall, shedding light like water.
A tangle of pipes extruded out and up from the brewery’s sides and roof like fingers come through a meat grinder. The dank alley surrounding the brewery was littered with glass and scuttling refuse that moved torturously in the wind.
She took hold of a sturdy elbow and mounted the wall, careful not to throw her weight in such a way that might buckle or snap the tenuous moorings.
There were faint sounds weltering through the shattered panes of glass. Coiling broken bits of conversation in Trade, not meant to be heard, rose heatedly into the deserted air.
The city was quiet here: only the drone of distant factories and the low, almost unheard hum of far-off conversations mixing with streetcars and footsteps and wind. The collective muffled roar hardly interfered with her ability to eavesdrop on the voices issuing from the brewery’s lightless interior.
“. . . got away. But not the others. Both dead.”
Someone answered. “. . . to be expected . . . not without a price.” The voices were passionate and tense as though discussing something monumentally significant.
Miriam’s fingertips were the only parts of her hands not covered by supple leather gloves. They searched the window ledge with expert care, feeling for blades of broken glass or loose mortar—any kind of dangerous debris. Her ears had tuned themselves to the conversation going on inside and she could now make out larger parts of what they were saying.
“Once this thing is stripped down I s’pose we’ll have the honor of carting it across town in chunks.”
The other voice muttered something indiscernible as Miriam found a handhold and pulled herself up into the casement. Her cloth boots had soft tacky rubber soles. They made no sound.
For a moment her body cut a lithe silhouette against the gray gloom of the alley while her eyes struggled to sort the murky shapes inside the building. Miriam had not carved her eyes. There was no way to tell whether the occupants would happen to look in her direction while she formulated her next move. All she could do was minimize her exposure by moving swiftly from conspicuous to hidden.
The element of chance was unavoidable.
Finally she made out a rusted tank. A great cylinder on its side. She leapt, lighted on its top, legs buckling to absorb her weight as soundlessly as possible. Even so, the landing produced a dull hum as the metal caved slightly and reverberated under her weight.
“What was that?”
Miriam opened her mouth and made a sound exactly like a cat. She tossed a shard of glass onto the floor.
“Some tom gone hunting,” said the other voice. “Where are you putting these?”
“Pile’s over there. Keep the fat ones separate. They go to the housing.”
“Fuck off! I know the difference between an anchor bolt and a—”
“Shh—”
Miriam stopped. She had left the tank and now crouched behind a thick staple of black pipe. A broken jar had scraped slightly as her foot touched it. The darkness was nearly impenetrable and she cursed silently that the gray row of squares through which she had come did not shed enough light to reach the floor. The windows served only to outline vague canisters and barrels that had once held grain.
Great bulkheads of machinery and partially scavenged stills occluded her vision. While the glow of a lantern crept around one great black shape and wavered on a slick of oil, it did not reach through the jungle of wheeled bins and other objects that cluttered the area around her.
Miriam bit her lip in frustration.
“Better check it out,” said one of the voices.
The sound of some heavy metal tool dragged across the floor. A man’s shadow passed in front of the lantern light.
“If it’s a cat, I’ll give it a new shape.” Miriam saw the giant shadow of a wrench swing across the cement and disappear into crowding pools of darkness.
There was something crawling through her hair. Gingerly she reached up and plucked it from the side of her face, tossed it aside without emotion.
She focused on where the searching man had gone. His footsteps echoed slightly, bouncing off countless metal bodies and the huge empty curve of ceiling overhead.
Miriam’s pupils had dilated to their widest possible diameter, crying out for any trace of light. She could see a ladder on the side of some tall metal structure. A chute perhaps that emptied into an enormous drum. She reached out for it hesitantly, keenly aware that the level of corrosion in the building made her peril that much greater.
She couldn’t tell what surfaces might support her weight and which ones might give way, call her out amid a ragged collapse of gashing metal edges and bars clattering to the floor.
She withdrew her hand from the ladder and melted back behind the tank, moving slowly but persistently away from the last place she had made noise.
Suddenly the beam of a chemiostatic torch cut a wide cone behind her, lime-colored light running over chains and pipes and wires. Miriam froze.
There was a support strut bolted to the wall that helped stabilize the tank. Biting her lip she crouched on it, pulling her feet up so that the torch wouldn’t reveal her legs if the man looked underneath.
The green light panned across the wall and up toward the ceiling.
“Shh, you daft prick! Keep that down from the windows. You want someone to see?”
The searching man did not respond but the light dropped and flicked under the tank. Miriam could hear
the man getting down on his hands and knees. The light played back and forth, inches below her feet.
“There’s nothing back here.”
Miriam used the light to her advantage, memorizing every detail of the landscape behind the tank. Then she closed her eyes to advance the process of readjusting to the dark. When she opened them the light was gone and the man had moved away, clomping over crumbling piles of discarded sheet metal and broken glass.
Miriam used his racket to mask her own sounds. She moved quickly and quietly through the dark jumble and into the diagonal shadows of a tall movable rack.
She could now see the lantern and the crouched forms of both men as the second one settled in again beside a large piece of dirty machinery. He switched off the torch.
“Nothing there,” he muttered.
“I heard you the first time,” said the other man. Both of them were covered in dust and grease. “Put that bar in here and pry up while I loosen this nut, will you?”
The second man thrust a heavy round crowbar into the engine and bent his back. They were dismantling some huge contraption that looked alien to and much newer than the apparatuses of the brewery. They had stacked various parts in neat piles around the floor.
Miriam had no idea what they were up to. She had come here only because the meeting at the surgery had prompted an investigation and additional leads indicated something was happening here at Vindai’s.
Her plan had been to nose about. She had not expected to find anyone.
She slunk closer, behind a pyramid of metal drums whose skins of salmon-orange paint fled rapidly spreading patches of corrosion.
“I don’t think we’ll have to carry it across town,” said the first man, going back to their earlier conversation. “But I bet we have to be there to put it back together.”
“Yeah. And soon,” said the second. “They ain’t goin’ back for seconds on this one. It’s gonna be all or nothing. Trust me.”
“You know what burns me?” The first man paused from his work. “I heard they got the opera muck running the first half of the show. I bet he puts little miss in a glass wagon right off, and all our late nights here are for nothing.”
The second man tilted his head sideways and scrunched up his face, dramatizing his uncertaninty. “I don’t know . . . the engine ain’t about puttin’ her down. lung says we’re s’posed to hit ’em everywhere at once . . . cuz we only got one chance at it. See, we gotta put the Sslî in a box before she’s Sslî . . . otherwise, there ain’t no goin’ back. And at the same time, we gotta get the book. So this is a complex sorta thing. Killin’ her and stealin’ from her at the same time, before there’s any warning . . . before the fuckin’ bulls know what hit ’em . . .”
There was the sound of some small part falling through the machine and clattering on the floor.
The man cursed, reached for the torch and flicked it on. Miriam faded back behind the drums. She peered between the imperfect slit where they met.
“I can’t reach it,” said the first man. “Can you lift it up a bit?” His shirt came up and Miriam saw the Hlid Mark above his navel.
Her plan turned from eavesdropping to interrogation.
The second man took hold of a driveshaft of some kind. “Not there, you clay-brained hedge-pig. You want to bend it? Grab it there, by the frame.”
The second man obeyed without rebuttal. Miriam heard him grunt. Veins roped his arms and neck as he cradled one end of the machine in his lap and lifted.
“If you drop this on me I’ll—”
Miriam was already moving. She had darted out from her hiding place and slipped up behind the second man, circling his throat with the crescent of her knife. He let out a gasp and the machine plunged down, crushing the first man’s arm underneath and pinning him to the floor. A scream of pain rocked the brewery and lifted out the shattered windows into the desolate alleys and dead-end streets.
Miriam backed the second man away from the machine, her sickle knife tugging at his skin. A vicious collar that made it impossible for him to swallow. The first man gurgled in agony, holding to the shoulder of the pinned arm with his free hand.
His eyes were glazed.
Miriam’s arms had folded expertly around the second man’s head, locking him in with her blade. As she moved him backward away from the machine, she called out to the first man’s blood, leaking from his arm like engine oil onto the floor. The Unknown Tongue and the Sisterhood’s brand of hemofurtum gathered his holojoules.
She seemed to choke on the throaty sounds that molded the coalescing power.
Then she finished the argument: 15
The air around the engine wavered like warped mirrors at a carnival, bending space into thin or fat distortions. Parodies of its own self. The trapped man screamed as his body began to colliquate and fuse with the metal.
Miriam froze in horror. Her equation was not supposed to do that. She could only watch in stupefied amazement as her formula went haywire, derailing and turning on itself, mutant and rogue and powerful.
Even the man in her lethal grasp went slack as he watched in fascination something grotesque and wild rippling around the machine.
Megan’s transumption hex wasn’t supposed to have happened yet. But that was what made it so dangerous and why the Sisterhood had pulled all their operators out of Stonehold: transumption hexes leaked unpredictably through time. This could easily be a premonition ripple that had seeped backward from the future. Miriam had been expecting repercussions but not so soon, not so violent and random . . . and close. She was the last witch in Stonehold, ignoring her own admonition.
“Where is the book?” she hissed into her captive’s ear, trying to ignore the horrifying results of her equation.
“Book? What book? I’m just a mechanic—”
Miriam pulled back on the bladed collar around his neck just enough that it broke the skin. “You know what I mean,” she whispered. “I want the Red Book. I want the Csrym T.”
Normally the Wllin Droul could not be bought or tortured, but this thin-blooded specimen was different. He was close to human, enough that he could be intimidated through violence.
“You are alone,” Miriam whispered, “with a Shrdnae Witch.” Her words had a visible effect, ending an assortment of possible games he might have otherwise played. He broke immediately.
“We ain’t got it—yet.”
“Yet? Then you must know who has it or where it is.”
She continued to back him away from the disquieting scene by the engine. The equation had resolved, died down like an over-boiling pot.
The first man was dead. It could no longer be determined where his body ended and the machine began. The smell of burnt hair and flesh was catching up to them, flowing outward from the point of violence.
“It’s comin’ to Isca Castle,” muttered the man. His own blood was wet and sticky on his neck. Miriam took him behind the tall movable rack toward the tank she had landed on when she had first entered the brewery. She stopped.
“Don’t make me ask for the rest,” she breathed.
“It’s comin’ with a girl. That’s all I know. I don’t know when or how. Sometime soon. We’re getting ready. We don’t know where it’s comin’ from. It’s just comin’. That’s all. That’s all, I swear.”
“Does the girl have a name?”
“Something with an S I think. They said Sauna or Sara. Something like that. I’m a crawler. They don’t tell me shit. You know that!”
Miriam scowled. Her heart cooled. She bit her lip as her mind began to work.
“Think harder. I need a name. If you can remember all the parts to that engine I’m sure you can remember a simple name.”
“I told you. It’s with an S. That’s all I know. It’s like Sema or Suana. I don’t fucking know!”
His distress was genuine, on the brink of being pathetic. But his last attempt had solidified a gut-turning hunch in Miriam’s stomach, something that sickened her at the same time that it gav
e her hope.
“Was it Sena?”
“Yeah, that’s it.” The man coughed. “I swear I ain’t just playing along. That’s the name I heard. How did you—?”
He dropped to his knees, relinquished from the deadly hold. There was the sound of something landing lightly on top of the tank, then the spring of the metal as it retook its original shape.
By the time the man turned around, Miriam had vanished through the same window she had come through and was running full-out down the alley, turning onto Seething Lane, sprinting down the cobbles, heading for home.
The man swore softly and touched his throat, beginning to formulate a story. Something simple, something he could remember if he was asked to retell it exactly, many times in a row.
When Miriam reached her flat in Maruchine she mounted the iron steps to her window in a winded flurry. She had left the casement open. Cool night air lapped past the tattered curtains, sinking the darkened apartment to a reclusive, somehow impolite temperature.
Miriam had never used the small coal-burning stove that tottered in the corner. She struck a match and lit an oil lamp. Orange light scraped over uneven plaster, revealing a room as exhausted as Miriam after her two-mile run.
She didn’t want to believe that Sena had somehow found the Csrym T. It seemed preposterous that Megan’s protégé could have discovered it and kept it secret when there were so many eyes looking for it, scouring the Hinterlands from here to Yorba.
Maybe Megan had planned it. Maybe she had found the book and given it to Sena to hide and reveal at some later time. A maneuver that would ensure Sena’s ascension to the tunsia circlet of Coven Mother.
No. Megan could not be trusted. Not with this particular information.
The realization filled Miriam with fear. She grew sick to think that she was going behind the Coven Mother’s back. But she had to be sure. She had to treat the man’s words as though they might be true, as though there were no other women named Sena in the north.
Miriam pondered the man she had interrogated. It was always difficult to tell, but she guessed he had told her the truth as far as he knew it. He was a weak link in the Cabal’s chain now. If his own order did not discover his treachery, she might return to him, find him again and extract additional information. It was no danger to leave him alive.
