Infernal Machines

by Jacobs, John Hornor

  ‘So, dawn then, or later,’ Praeverta said.

  ‘Yes. But there’s something more,’ Lina said. ‘There are runners. But it’s strange. One is—’

  ‘A vaettir?’ I asked. My voice sounded loud even to me in the stillness. The women turned to consider me.

  ‘Yes,’ Lina said. ‘One of the runners is large, and terribly fast. A stretcher. But the other runners, they are fast as well. There’s something unnatural about them,’ she said, puzzlement furrowing her brow.

  ‘They are fast,’ I said. ‘And unnatural. They are the engineer’s pets.’

  Praeverta looked confused and Lina cocked her head.

  ‘This engineer you want so badly – he’s not the kind of engineer made for filling Hellfire shells with imps and lesser daemons. No. He’s after bigger things. And where he puts his devils is far worse than a rifle shell.’

  Praeverta’s eyes grew large and she said, ‘Men?’

  ‘And worse. His daemon-gripped are terrible to behold.’

  ‘We heard rumour of this, but I did not believe it,’ the old woman said.

  ‘Believe it. Or not. You’re about to witness it first-hand.’

  ‘And how do we deal with these daemon-gripped?’ Lina asked.

  ‘Like anything. You shoot them. You stab them. The problem is getting them to slow down long enough for you to put enough metal in them to die.’ I shook my head. ‘Silver helps.’

  ‘We have very little of that,’ Lina said. She looked at me with a curious, penetrating stare, as if evaluating me for some task that I was not aware of, and again I had the niggling sensation – the memory almost – that we had met before.

  ‘I think the best course is to let Fisk and me deal with the stretcher and daemon-gripped, and your people deal with the Medieran riders.’

  ‘And the engineer?’ Praeverta asked.

  ‘He will not hazard himself. He never hazards himself. He prizes his own comfort and the integrity of his skin more than anything else. To reach Beleth,’ I said, rubbing my lip and saying it almost to myself, ‘We’ll have to go through them. Be ready for the chase if we live through the vanguard.’

  Praeverta lifted her chin. The skin of her neck was loose, and it stretched out with the movement. It wasn’t pride, nor disdain; it was the eye. My grandmam had it. My mother, too. The one-eyed stare. Fixed in half their gaze, as if by halving it, it became distilled, more focused, making the open one more perceptive. I laughed when she did it. It was such a dvergar thing.

  ‘Yes, Matve. Yes, ma’am,’ I said, ducking my head. Ducking my head at nothing.

  For a moment I thought she might smile, but instead her jaw locked and something in her calcified against me.

  ‘You are a buffoon and an idiot. That we have fallen so low to have our fortunes shackled to you. Where will you and the human stand?’ she asked.

  ‘I imagine we’ll take cover in a couple of the gulleys leading to the Bitter Spring. If we perch up here, the stretcher and his pet will sniff us right off.’

  ‘And my vaettir? Where will they be?’ she asked.

  ‘We’re clever, we dvergar,’ I said, knowing that would irk her, claiming kinship. ‘And mountainsides are our business from old. Set a guard on high, one guard.’ I pointed at a lower fold in the land, creased by pathways, smooth and ancient, water-worn. ‘Let that one guard give signal when they approach so that your people – your vaettir – can scramble up the gulley walls and do as much violence upon their persons as they can manage. Set ropes for climbing and gather stones for throwing. Sharpen your scythes and daggers. Dig holes to break their horses’ legs and stretch hemp at rider height to knock them from saddles. Fight as we dvergar were born to fight. With cunning and ferociousness.’

  The younger woman nodded. But Praeverta did not thaw. The old woman sniffed and gave the barest inclination of her head.

  But she heard. Turning, she walked away without any farewell – not that I expected any – and worked her way back down the switchback path. I watched her go. Lina remained with me, as Praeverta walked away.

  Finally, she said, ‘I thought you’d be taller.’

  ‘What?’ I said.

  ‘Taller. The way they always told it was you were a beast, a half-man brute, and taller,’ Lina said.

  ‘What are you talking about?’ I asked.

  ‘I’m talking about Tapestry. And my grandmother, Illina. The woman whose name I bear.’ She stood and brushed off her dungarees and adjusted her longknife in its scabbard. ‘And I’m talking about you, grandfather,’ she said.

  There was not much room for thought, then, and so much to do. Lina – or Illina, I should say, but I couldn’t think of her as such, since all my memories with that name were bound up with love and lust and loss – fended herself from any more of my questions and set to preparing defences against the oncoming riders, and I was left stunned, tottering about.

  ‘What in perdition is wrong with you, Shoe?’ Fisk asked. ‘You been into the cacique?’

  ‘Family reunion,’ I said.

  My partner whistled. ‘Ia-damn.’ He chuckled. ‘Hope it wasn’t some bastard you got on someone you shouldn’t have.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Dvergar only have bastards when Rumans are around. She’s my granddaughter.’

  Ignoring the jab at Rumans, Fisk peered about, as if looking to spot Lina in the dim, timeless half-light of morning. ‘The fast one, the sharp girl?’ he asked.

  ‘That’s the one.’

  ‘She’s pretty, pard. And acute,’ he said. For Fisk, this was high praise.

  ‘She is of me, but a me that was so long ago,’ I said. ‘My wife. The devourer’s disease. We had children but they were grown and I left because I was young then and stupid. And tainted.’

  ‘Tainted?’ Fisk said. ‘How is that?’

  ‘I share some of your blood, partner. Severus Speke was my father, a centurion of the First Occidentalia. He had eagle phalerae and a gladius and a Hellfire rifle and he took up with my mother during the push west through the Smokeys to the Hardscrabble. I wasn’t born long after.’

  Fisk looked at me for a long while. ‘Parentage is a dicey business,’ he said. ‘They stand like mountains when you are young, and diminish with each year until you are on an eye-line with their peak, a long slide from idol to idiot.’

  ‘Would that I had cacique,’ I said, ‘I would drain it to the dregs.’

  ‘Bah. That’s horseshit,’ he said. ‘Afterwards, maybe. And she knew you?’

  ‘It seems I am short, and do not measure up to the old stories.’

  ‘No one does.’ Fisk laughed. Inbhir and the one they called Ringold looked at him strangely. ‘And we’re all short,’ Fisk said. His smile died. ‘None of us stand more than three hands high, in our graves.’

  We took our places. Praeverta’s vaettir made ready hemp and knife and Hellfire, what they had. Their guard, the fair vanmer Ilyani girl, scurried up a smooth gulley wall and perched herself where she could see any approach. The fire was stoked with bramble and any other combustibles, while Bess was led away to hide in a cave mouth. She hawed but did not buck.

  The cross of sky lightened, sweet to the eye and striated with clouds, and fingers of light painted the dvergar faces, normally dark, in rosy, refulgent hues.

  A clatter of rocks. A hiss and fall of sediment. A coyote’s call.

  The signal.

  The dvergar climbed high, strong hands digging into the stone gulley-sides. A hooting sound. A screech.

  Down the gulley they came loping, half-devils, half-men. There were three of them. Their mouths black maws, their eyes empty, they ran on hands and feet in mockery of human form. Fire was in them and they imitated it as they ran, eating away the distance like a flame consuming hair.

  Silhouettes of dvergar peeked over canyon lip. Rocks raised high. I lifted my hand in an angry fist.

  Wait.

  Behind them, it came. Towering. Fast as nightmare and shadow.

  The vaettir. Th
e bloody stretcher, daemon-gripped. It ran, feet churning like furious steamer paddles, like the beating of hummingbird wings. It arced down the gulley, running along the wall.

  Gynth.

  It was my friend, the vaettir that saved me, saved me three times, once in the Hardscrabble, once on the Gemina, and once in Harbour Town.

  He was nude, now, and streaked in crimson as he ran. But it was him. Head full of teeth, hands hard and flexing. Dick flopping with every footfall. I wouldn’t back him in the Passasuego Beauty Day Parade any more, that’s for sure.

  He leapt up and landed on the rim of the gulley above, looking down at us. His gaze fixed on me, and Fisk at my side.

  ‘There!’ Gynth screamed in the common tongue. ‘There they are! Kill them and bring me the hand. Kaˉn! Kaˉn!’

  The bedevilled men raced down the gullet of the canyon toward us.

  ‘Now,’ I yelled. The dvergar above let fly their rocks and they came raining down with a tremendous clatter.

  A daemon-gripped man collapsed, head stoved in, and another dropped, back crushed.

  Gynth peered about with dreadful malevolence and, leaping across the gulley, snatched up the poor vanmer girl who had stood watch, shook her like a rag doll, and cast her down. He was closer now and the morning’s light fell full upon him; I could see the scorch marks and bloody intaglios carved upon his flesh. I had seen it before.

  The other half-devil shot forward, faster than I would’ve thought possible. Fisk’s pistol boomed, smoke billowed. Hellfire’s despair and fear filled us. The last daemon-gripped man pitched forward like a marionette with its strings cut.

  At the sound of Fisk’s gunshot, horses whinnied and screamed and the sound of their hooves came thunderous, echoing strangely down the length of the gulley. More gunshots and smoke. The dvergar – they that had guns – began firing.

  ‘Leave the vaettir to me,’ I told Fisk. ‘Do not shoot him.’

  ‘Are you out of your Ia-damned mind?’ Fisk said.

  I pulled the knife – the silver one – from my boot. ‘Possibly.’

  I was out and near the fire as fast as my feet could take me. I lost my hat and my head stood bare beneath the stretcher.

  ‘I’ve got that Ia-damned daemon hand, you son of a bitch. Come and take it,’ I said, and ran down the gulley, away from the fire. Gynth followed. Despite the din of gunplay and the clatter of falling rocks, I could hear the vaettir’s footfalls as he came forward, each one distinct, the flurry of them. I ducked under one of the hemp clotheslines Praeverta’s men had set out, and kept hauling.

  A cessation of footsteps. I glanced back. The stretcher had leapt up and over the trap and came down right behind me.

  I drew my six-gun and turned, one hand holding the silver blade, the other out and firing.

  But Gynth was too fast for me. His hand lanced out and raked my forearm from nook to fingertip, ripping through cuff and shirt and leaving bloody furrows in the flesh. My pistol spun away.

  Gynth pounced, snatching me up in big hands and falling forward so that I was pinned underneath him.

  ‘Mister Ilys.’ The voice came from that crooked, toothsome mouth. It wasn’t Gynth but I had figured that already. ‘So good to see you again.’

  ‘I see you got yourself a new suit,’ I said.

  ‘Yessss,’ Beleth said. The mouth cracked into a wide smile. ‘We caught this one up in a net, after you killed my horse. I liked that horse. But I think I like this one,’ he patted his belly with a long, clawed hand, ‘even better. He fits me so well, it will be hard to go back to my own.’ The glee that informed the stretcher’s features disappeared. ‘Enough of this. I will reduce you to scraps of flesh if you—’

  A bright ululation, a screech. From a woman’s mouth this time, and in imitation of a vaettir. Lina fell upon Beleth’s back, plunging a knife into the meat of his shoulder. For an instant, he twitched and loosened his grip upon me.

  It was enough. For I am old, and I will not give up this life so easy. I writhed in his clutch. I squirmed and fretted, jerking my head upwards. It caught his chin, the anvil jaw of the vaettir he rode, and threw its head back.

  I held up the knife in one smoking hand. The silver ate at my dvergar flesh – the flesh that bore such kinship with the elf – and I put it up to Beleth’s face, before his eyes.

  ‘This is the blade that killed Agrippina and put the Crimson Man back in his cage,’ I said. ‘And it will be the one that will find you.’

  The stretcher that Beleth wore bucked wildly and Lina went flying. I held on, one arm cupped around the thing’s neck as if we were lovers. I brought the knife across with all my strength. Not across the stretcher’s neck, not searching for those milk-blue sanguiducts there. On the intaglioed ruin of its chest.

  I cut the genius loci glyph. I cut it deep.

  The creature stiffened, its eyes rolling back in its head. His body went slack and I rolled away.

  In the distance I heard gunfire and the clatter of rocks. Lina moaned. Horses screamed.

  The vaettir opened its eyes and sat up. It looked around. Its gaze fell upon me.

  ‘Gynth,’ it said, and the mouth full of teeth cracked into a smile.

  EIGHT

  We’re Going to Steal It

  TENEBRAE WAS AS good as his word and at another stable with the markings of a bull, we found horses and blankets. Lupina changed her clothes and I changed mine – though the ones in my rucksack were damp as well. Lupina warmed Fiscelion and I gave the darling a teat to feed while Carnelia rubbed us down with the horse-cloth.

  ‘Escape with an infant is problematic,’ Tenebrae said. ‘But he is a remarkably sturdy little fellow.’ He looked down on the beatific face of my child and smiled. ‘He looks like Secundus.’

  ‘A bit,’ I said. I did not bother to draw the blanket over my exposed breast. Our bodies root us, our bodies are what they are. We are born into pain, and our bodies tether us to it, but it does not have to be so, always. That part of us that cannot die, that incorruptible part that connects Fisk to me and me to my son – that does not have to live in pain.

  And Tenebrae was not the sort of man to quail at the sight of a woman’s breast. ‘Too early to know how he will look as a man.’

  We tarried only the briefest time, long enough to warm ourselves and sate Fiscelion. And then we were back ahorse – Carnelia and I doubling on horseback, since I had lost my saddle in our passage beneath the Mithranalian Gate – passing through farmland, past hamlets and villages that clung to the walls of Rume like ticks on a wild dog’s belly. Past tenement houses and shanties and dust-filled graveyards of broken chairs and stoves and spokeless wagon wheels – the remains of industry unceremoniously trucked outside the walls and beyond the hills of Rume into the country to moulder out of sight of the greater population.

  A mechanised baggage-train, daemon-driven, cut through the countryside, parallel to the Via Miasma that followed the Tever. The machine vomited black smoke from its stacks, and it whisked down the train to finally rise up to join the clouds hanging low and heavy. The rain fell on our party, and none save Fiscelion remained dry.

  The Tever flowed shit-brown and wide there, swift and swollen with the deluge. Trees and submerged sodden things were carried downstream, turning sluggishly with the quickening current.

  ‘There is a ferry here, near Rezzo. Some fifteen miles distant,’ Tenebrae said. ‘Let us hurry.’

  ‘Rezzo? Where the College of Engineers keeps its headquarters?’ Carnelia asked.

  ‘The same,’ Tenebrae said. ‘Tamberlaine declared that all engineer work be done there, now, for fear of the fate of Harbour Town.’

  ‘A sensible precaution,’ I said. Tamberlaine was a meddling and manipulative man, but his rule of Rume and her territories was, as always, ruthlessly and eminently practical. It was even hard remaining outraged at his treatment of us, the Cornelian brood. It was like being angry at a snake for its venom, or a bear for its strength – it was his nature and we all, event
ually, succumb to our own natures. I think what gives us pain in life is not recognising our natures and having to deny them.

  I would be with my husband, and safe. I would provide a good home to my son and see him happy. I would make the world safe for him. Is that my nature? Or is it simply what I wish for?

  Rezzo loomed in the distance. It was an industrial town, situated some twenty miles north of Rume on the Tever, and was the doorway to the mountains in the north and the nexus of all the highways leading to Nexia on the Nous, or Gall beyond.

  I had never been to Rezzo. My life as a daughter of a Cornelian kept me from the more industrious and, I might say, dirtier parts of our land. Growing up, we visited Cumae, Cimbri, l’Umo Usca, and beyond, on the shores of the Occidens and the tip of our great sea – the play places of patriarchs and their overstuffed, alabaster wives and children.

  But I knew of it. It was full of carpentry shops and wheelwrights – the most famous of which was the Sator Rotas workshop, of course. It teemed with stonemasons and fresco artists, plasterers and mortar men and shipbuilders shielded from the storms of the Occidens by thirty miles of land. And there were engineers. Many schools of engineering and official buildings related to that function – silver brokers and warehousers, cohort barracks that held the legionnaires who protected the silver pigs stacked high in their warded warehouses, and the apprentices and servants, the great throng of slaves that serviced those who serviced Rume.

  An ugly town, squatting on the Tever’s shore. Pillars of smoke poured from it and baggage trains ran to it to add their dust to the city’s.

  It was mid-morning when we came to it.

  ‘They will have discovered we’re gone by now,’ Carnelia said. There was tension in her voice and hearing it, I felt it in myself, thrumming. Anxious.

  ‘The question is, will Father drag his feet to notify Tamberlaine?’ I said.

  ‘He won’t if he doesn’t want to be crucified,’ Tenebrae said. Lupina harrumphed. As one of our company who had experienced living under the shadow of crucifixion, she did not like hearing it bandied about. But Tenebrae was not exaggerating in this case.