Infernal Machines

by Jacobs, John Hornor

  ‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘Everything.’

  ‘We love you, Father,’ Carnelia said. ‘Please remember that.’

  ‘Of course!’ he said, and swayed some. ‘How could I forget?’

  He stumped off, looking for whiskey.

  We waited.

  After the villa settled around us, the soft sounds of footsteps and washbasins filling and emptying faded away, slaves and servants banking lanterns and stoking fires and filling decanters ceased, and the final hush of night settled on the Cornelian villa like a blanket. We left Lupina watching Fiscelion. Fully dressed in dark, outrider garb, we crept from our chambers on cat paws and made our way to Fuqua’s quarters, downstairs, near the library. Carnelia held her sword in hand, sheathed, like an elderly gentleman who carries a cane for fashion’s sake, but does not need it.

  In Rume, no slave or servant may lock a door within his master’s house. There is a distinct law prohibiting this after the Terracina Revolt of 2501, and it’s one I’ve always found antiquated and ridiculous. Should the patriarch come round at night and fix the shutters and close and bar the front gate? Should he lock the cupboards and all the entryways? Most of Rume ignored this antiquated law. But Fuqua was a Cornelian man, through and through.

  At his room, I pushed the door open. There was no lock.

  He was sitting at his desk. The space was well lit, and he looked up from his writing as if he was expecting something.

  ‘Will you take the boy with you?’ he asked.

  ‘What?’ I said, too startled to say anything else.

  ‘Will you leave Fiscelion here, when you go?’ Fuqua asked.

  ‘No,’ I said, somewhat taken aback. The idea had never occurred to me. ‘He goes where I go.’

  He looked a bit disappointed at the news. ‘I don’t want to know where that might be,’ he said. He pointed to a money purse on his desk. ‘There is all the money in the house, less our operating costs until we can make a withdrawal from the College of Investment and Indemnity. It’s a tidy sum, over a hundred silver and many gold denarii.’

  I picked up the purse. It was very heavy. With it, we could get to Occidentalia.

  ‘How did you know?’ I asked.

  Fuqua glanced at Carnelia, who stood holding her sword, silently. A curiously soft expression was on her face.

  ‘I have watched you both grow, if not since children, since you were young women. You are your father’s children. Never in my time here, serving your family, have I seen either of you ever do a thing that you did not acquiesce to,’ he said, spreading his hands in explanation. ‘I had to take but one look at your faces to know.’

  ‘Are we that obvious?’ I asked.

  ‘At least to me,’ he said. He stood and came around the table, holding keys. ‘There are horses in the stable – I readied them myself. Now, I fear you must go. But before you do, you must—’

  Carnelia, holding her jian in a strange reverse grip, smashed the hilt into Fuqua’s face and he collapsed to the floor. She snatched up the keys.

  ‘Why did you do that?’ I asked. ‘He might have had more to say—’

  ‘I spared him the anxious waiting. I am not cruel, and he knew it was coming. If we left him unharmed—’

  ‘Father would crucify him,’ I said, putting it together. I had not thought this endeavour all the way through, it seemed.

  Carnelia checked his breathing. ‘He’ll live.’ The side of his face had swollen horrendously in the few moments he’d been un-conscious. ‘And have a cracker of a headache when he wakes.’ She looked down on him. ‘Thank you, Fuqua,’ she said.

  Lupina was ready when we returned to the room. She had Fiscelion in a curious fabric sling hugging her chest. At her belted waist, a cleaver and small cudgel. I took up my rucksack, and Carnelia took hers. I checked my sawn-off, in its holster on my thigh.

  ‘We will have to go out of the window as we used to when we were girls, sissy,’ Carnelia said. ‘Risking the guards at the doors is too much.’

  ‘Of course.’ I turned to Lupina. ‘Do we need to lower Fiscelion—’

  Lupina moved to the open window, hopped up on the stone casement, and said, ‘I’ve scaled the Eldvatch with a child sucking at my breast. This is nothing.’ She disappeared outside.

  We followed, clinging to the wet Finder’s Rose that covered the rear side of the villa. When we were girls, we would sneak away so often and with such determination to see the Covinian boys who lived close-by, going in and out down the wall’s growth, that it had a strip of roots bare of leaf running from the ground to our window. The house cook then, Drusillia, would complain about the lack of capers for her tunny, though the wall still provided ample – the house slaves and servants loved their two wild Cornelian girls. And their capers.

  The horses were saddled – including a small pony for Lupina, who mounted and rode with no trouble at all – and we took them into the street without bothering to put cloth on their hooves – that would have been a sure sign of skulduggery, if there was any. The rain muffled our horse’s footfalls and our cloaks, drawn over our heads, hid our identity from view. But it was with great restraint that we walked out onto the Cælian and down into the cobbled streets toward the Mithranalian Gate.

  We passed the desolate Mezzo Market, empty at the late hour, though there were chickens clucking nearby and a few shadowed figures slumped in watchful repose under oilcloth tarps, guarding wares.

  Past tenements and shanties to the great, grotesque Tever, muddy and gurgling and swift, flowing west toward Ostia and the sea. Through the rain-slicked financial district and counting houses on the Macean Hill, and to the suburbs of industry on the edges of Rume.

  The city was dark and still. The grey, rain-threaded skies made a pregnant hush that filled the streets. It was a Rume I never knew and one, now that I was leaving it forever, I might have wanted to know better.

  We made our way, quietly, softly down alleys and past crossroad colleges. The few vigiles and praefects that noted us did not ask for our identities and we did not offer them. They moved with the desperation of the wet with a warm, dry place waiting for them.

  The Mithranalian Gate was in view when a man stepped into the road, directly in front of us.

  ‘Where do you think you’re going?’ Tenebrae said.

  FIVE

  The Vaettir Need Hellfire

  NIGHT HAD FALLEN and Bess was sucking wind hard by the time we reached the Bitter Spring. I’d put her to the spur – something I’d never done with any vigour before – and she took great umbrage to it, bucking and hawing. The situation made it necessary, but that hurt me. She’d been called my wife in jest by Andrae, and that had rankled, but I loved the beast and hated Beleth all the more for forcing my urgency upon her.

  The Bitter Spring was a sulphurous, if fresh, upwelling of water from the sundered Hardscrabble, situated in a warren of eroded gulleys. Some time in the dim recesses of history, more water flowed from it and made smooth the gulley walls that, if one travelled them, could open up on canyons or disappear into the earth in caves with mouths like the gullets of giants.

  The water smoked and stank of rotten eggs. Nothing is easy in the Hardscrabble. We had to fill the only skillet I’d managed to keep since the destruction of Harbour Town and let it cool before being able to drink. Cool, the water was yellow and gritty. The horses drank first, slowly, so slowly, tonguing the pan when the water was gone. When they stopped foaming and heaving, we took our share of the rank stuff. It tasted terrible, but it eased our terrible thirst and refreshed us. I filled our canteens and waterbags and then continued to fill the skillet for our mounts until they were sated.

  Fisk opened his Quotidian and let blood and fed it to the in-fernal thing. It steamed and hissed and gave off a charnel stench, yet did not write down any words when he placed the parchment beneath it.

  I have never seen Fisk as enraged as he was then. He screeched, as if he was a vaettir howling at the sky, and kicked the dust, bowling over the dev
ice and spilling the remains of his blood onto the dirt.

  ‘It could be anything,’ I said.

  He did not respond, but stood panting, staring into the myriad gulleys that snaked away from the Bitter Spring.

  ‘She has Fiscelion. Just a babe. Did she not say that feeding him was tiring and she needed to keep up her strength?’ I rolled tabac in a paper and lit it. ‘She is safe. She is well, my friend.’

  Those sentiments went unremarked upon. Fisk drew his pistol.

  ‘Now, pard, you don’t need to—’

  ‘Shut up, Shoe,’ he said. His shoulders tightened and he stilled. ‘We got company.’

  I hopped up and drew my six-gun. I had let my mouth get away with me, once again.

  ‘How did they get here so fast? It’s nigh on impossible,’ I said.

  ‘It isn’t Beleth, or his Medieran horsemen,’ Fisk said.

  In the dark I could make out many figures moving in the gulleys. Small figures. ‘And it ain’t vaettir, because they don’t move like—’

  A voice rang out in the dark. ‘On the contrary, dimidius, we are vaettir,’ rang out a woman’s voice from the darkness.

  They came forward, weapons out. It was dvergar, my kin, bearing arms – guns, knives, swords, cleavers, scythes. And at their head was the hard-bitten, wrinkled old woman from the Harbour Town meeting. The mean-spirited one who didn’t have much trust for me, and looked upon my person with the aspect of a matron at market, having found a tomato that has gone rotten.

  ‘Matve Praeverta,’ I said. ‘I am glad to see you made it out of Harbour Town alive.’

  ‘No you’re not, dimidius.’ Like in Harbour Town, she used the Ruman word as an insult – a thing of halves. ‘Throw down your guns and we won’t kill you where you stand.’

  ‘That’s not going to happen,’ Fisk said, and fired. A larger dvergar, one who carried Hellfire, yelped and his gun went flying. ‘I’ll put one in his eye next, grandmother.’

  Praeverta’s expression did not change – her dour, craggy face remained immobile. But she stopped and gestured for her companions to do so as well. Dvergar live long lives, and Praeverta could remember Occidentalia before the Rumans and Medierans came to take the land. But it’s a Ruman custom to believe that with age life is less precious because of the lack of it remaining. My kin know that even with our long lives, the last years are the most precious, and we do not wish to give them up easily. Not without a fight. She would not hazard herself – or her party – unless desperate.

  ‘It looks like there are eleven of you,’ I said. ‘And it just happens that that is how many bullets Fisk and I have left. So why don’t we all take a step back and calm down.’

  Praeverta sneered, but took two steps back. ‘We need water. We’re here to drink, the same as you.’

  ‘Send someone forward to retrieve it,’ Fisk said. ‘I’ll not shoot them unless they make a hostile move.’

  Praeverta chucked her head and two figures came forward. They were vanmer, the fair, blond dvergar that are rare and considered beautiful or hideous, depending on whether you value the differences in people or hate them. They both were missing hair and had burns, like myself, on the backs of their hands and necks. Refugees from the Harbour Town conflagration.

  Behind us, Fisk’s horse nickered. I watched as a sly expression creased the crags of Praeverta’s face.

  ‘Inbhir!’ she called. ‘The horse!’

  A gun boomed, followed by a high-pitched falling scream. Then silence.

  Praeverta, who held a short hand-scythe, hooked it into her belt and said to her people, ‘Put up your weapons, and go butcher that thing. We’ll have a fire and meal before morning.’

  Fisk began cursing, long and steady. Praeverta laughed. ‘Keep your weapons, Ruman. You’re with us now.’

  Bess hawed in the darkness and I worried they would kill her too, but they did not.

  ‘There are men, many men, with guns and blades and Hellish companions on their way here now,’ Fisk said, grinding his teeth. ‘And you’ve reduced me to walking.’

  ‘To keep you from running. Hard being taken down a notch, is it, big man?’ said a rough-voiced dvergar man, busying himself with a small pail at the Bitter Spring. ‘There are great changes on the wind, and the smell of brimstone,’ he said.

  ‘Catch Hands,’ Praeverta said, ‘help with the horse, the Ilyani won’t know muzzle from arse.’ She turned to me, ignoring Fisk. ‘Keep your friend on a leash and we’ll get along just fine. Now. About these men following you. Why are you on the run, dimidius? I could tell from the first time I saw you that you were a man of no place and unwanted. But why? Have you turned against the foreigners, too?’

  I spoke to her in dvergar, ‘I am of the West and this is my home. My blood offends you, yet it is of this place as much as yours.’

  ‘Don’t dirty your mouth with our speech. You are half-Ruman and serve them. Why do these men chase you?’

  ‘The man chasing us does so because we have injured him, and his endeavours, greatly. He was the one who destroyed Harbour Town,’ I said.

  Praeverta squinted at me and pursed her lips. She might’ve been a handsome woman once – she had strong cheekbones and still lustrous, if greying, hair. She was fit, if bowed some by years, and had clever hands. But her mouth was cruel.

  ‘You’re lying to me. About what, I don’t know.’ And on that score, she was correct. I could not tell her about the daemon hand that Fisk held, and I feared that her horse-butchers would find it themselves.

  Fisk must’ve had the same thought because he scooped up the Quotidian, returning it to its warded case and then went to his fallen mount. ‘Hold there, hold on. Have you never butchered a shoal auroch?’ He pulled his longknife. ‘I’ll do it, or you’ll cut my tack and bloody my gear.’

  Praeverta had watched him closely, I noticed. ‘These Rumans with their infernal machines. And you ride with them.’ She shook her head before I could respond. ‘Let us circle back, dimidius. How could one man have destroyed Harbour Town, hmmm?’ she said.

  I said nothing.

  ‘What? A stretcher taken your tongue?’ Praeverta chuckled. She squatted down on her hams and removed a small steel flask and took a sip. ‘No. I think not.’ She looked at me a long while. ‘These infernal machines,’ she said again, softly.

  Something in her demeanour changed and she stood up.

  ‘Vaettir!’ she called. ‘Brothers and Sisters of the Mountain. Let us eat this flesh the Rumans have so willingly provided. Then we shall plan and make ready an ambush. One of the Ruman engineers rides to us, following these sad souls.’ She gestured to Fisk and me.

  Turning in a circle and speaking loud for us all, an exultant look suffused her weathered face.

  ‘We shall catch this man and bring him to Neruda,’ she said, raising her hands in a victorious gesture. ‘We shall capture this engineer, for the vaettir need Hellfire!’

  A sculptor. A man very much like me, a child of halves. Neruda, the man of the West, father of the vaettir and leader of the dvergar.

  SIX

  Not Entirely Honourable

  TENEBRAE REMAINED MOTIONLESS, framed in the alley, the Mithrandian Gate looming in the rain-misted distance, behind him. The moment drew out, elastic.

  Carnelia moved. She was off her mount almost faster than I could see and her jian was out and flashing. Tenebrae, not one to be caught off guard, drew a pistol in one hand and a gladius in the other and assumed a defensive stance.

  Their swords met with a bright sound, ringing out in the night, cutting through the sound of the rain. Carnelia lunged, but Tenebrae moved off her centre-line and swung his six-gun like a bludgeon. Carnelia wasn’t there any more, having followed her forward momentum with a roll that seemed almost animalistic in its fluidity. She popped up and turned, her cloak swirling around her.

  Their swords met again as she came forward, clanging twice so fast it was hard to discern the separate sounds, and Carnelia’s foot lashed out and caught
Tenebrae hard on the thigh as he was stepping forward. His foot slipped on the rain-slicked cobbles and he went tumbling at an angle, away from her.

  But he was a trained praetorian, having spent years at armatura and war-play, if not war itself, and he was back on his feet before Carnelia could press her advantage.

  A strange grin came across his face. ‘Sun Huáng would never have given you a sword had you not merited it,’ he said, his voice not angry; if there was any emotion there, it was sadness. ‘How Secundus wished that it had been him.’

  Carnelia dashed forward, again. A flashing feint, a crosswise strike, a pointed lunge. Tenebrae danced backward and out of the way. The blows that came near, he caught on his blade and would twist, redirecting, so that her sword would whip around, as if he had used the power of Carnelia’s strikes to rebound against her. He was not over-matched, yet he was wary.

  Like her wit, Carnelia’s sword was vicious.

  She attacked in a breathless rush, feinting, slicing, and probing Tenebrae’s defences. He stopped talking and pursed his lips in concentration, his blond hair plastered to his face. I slipped from my horse and withdrew my sawn-off.

  Tenebrae pressed against her. Carnelia was fast, but he was strong, and his sword was heavier. He came forward, using both his sword and gun, batting the jian to the side and lashing forward with the muzzle of his pistol, catching Carnelia in the side. Had he fired at that moment, much of the alleyway would have been covered with my sister’s insides. She twisted away, hissing.

  But then, I was near. I levelled the shotgun at Tenebrae’s chest and he stopped his forward movement and raised his hands. ‘Enough,’ I said. ‘This noise will draw guards, and had you wanted to arrest us, you would have been accompanied. Why are you here and what do you want?’

  Tenebrae lowered his weapons. ‘I guessed you would run – what Tamberlaine has planned for you both would not sit well with you.’

  ‘Does all of Rume know we’re fleeing?’ Carnelia asked, exasperated, sword point still firmly levelled at Tenebrae’s heart.